Wealth Formula Podcast

Last week I did an emergency podcast to make sure everyone is aware of an upcoming change related to the whole life policies we use inside of Wealth Formula Banking. It all revolves around recent changes made to IRC Section 7702, with is the IRS code that dictates how life insurance policies are taxed. Since the 1980's, the code mandated insurance companies who offer whole life to offer a 4% guaranteed interest rate on the cash value. Well, as you know, interest rates have come a long way since then. In essence, the change allows the insurance companies to choose the minimum rate they'll offer on their products, putting it somewhere between 2.0–3.75%. The companies who have already released their new product have come in at a 3% guarantee. To be clear, anyone who has one of these policies will continue to get your 4%. And, it isn't as if the total return in these policies will all of a sudden drop dramatically. The change really only impacts things if the total return including the dividend, which is currently between 5–6%, drops to a level where we start bumping into the guaranteed rates. With that being said, if you are someone who is planning on or even considering using Wealth Formula Banking to increase investment profits and would like to lock in the 4% guarantee, you'll want to get the process started ASAP in order to make sure we hit the end-of-year deadline. The underwriting process typically takes 4–6 weeks to complete, and we expect to see a large surge of new business as we get closer to the deadline of January 1, so the sooner we act, the better chance we have of getting it done before the deadline! If you'd like to review this option for yourself, send a message to [email protected] to discuss and decide the best course of action. Now, in the spirit of Life Insurance Related Strategies, I am releasing a bonus podcast shortly about charitable strategies that involve life insurance. The interesting thing about these strategies, as you will see, is that they are win-win-win propositions. And for the high net worth individuals who can implement them can end up giving a ton of money but receiving even more. It's real and it's perfectly legal. Listen to the podcast HERE.

I began talking about cryptocurrency on Wealth Formula Podcast in 2017. Many joined the crypto world after that and have made a significant amount of money. If you are one of those people…you're welcome! Those who stayed on the sidelines often felt, for good reason, that cryptocurrency was just a big digital fad and that it would probably die out like tulips of the past. Well, there was a deep frost that did kill many projects between then and now, but one thing is now very clear. Cryptocurrency is here to stay. Now learning about cryptocurrency is a little challenging because, in my humble opinion, it is actually more than one thing. Let me summarize how I see the cryptosphere today. There is bitcoin which has established itself, even at the level of governments, as a digital asset with intrinsic value—a type of digital gold. Then, there are cryptocurrencies that are not bitcoin. These are known as alternative coins or altcoins. To me, each of these altcoin projects are essentially a tech start-up. Bitcoin purists like calling altcoins "shit coins" and promise that they will all eventually fade away. I don't personally believe that prophecy. Let's riff off of this idea that each altcoin is a tech start-up. Back in the dot com era there were companies like Amazon, Google and Apple that became legends in the tech sector. There were also companies like pets.com that went belly up in flames. That's what I think is going to happen with the alt space in cryptocurrency. Most of these tokens will be losers but there will be a handful of projects that will become household names or will simply become part of the fabric of daily life. Today, you certainly see that some are less risky than others. Ethereum is a pretty safe bet to be in that future successful crew. It's likely to be worth a lot more in 10 years than it is today. As far as crypto goes, this would be a blue-chip stock. Others will be more risky bets, but the gains could dwarf those that will be seen by Ethererum investors. You could go down the line and make an argument about a number of decentralized protocols, a potential long-term success or failure. I look at them the same way I would look at startup companies and invest in them with my asymmetric portfolio accordingly. But getting back to bitcoin—it's totally different from the alts. Bitcoin is not a tech company. Bitcoin's closest comparison in today's financial world is gold. And as Wall Street and various governments start to adopt bitcoin, you can see it make its way into the future of money. Nik Bhatia sees this economic history unfolding in real time and will explain it to all of us in this week's episode of Wealth Formula Podcast. Listen HERE.

This is a 5 minute update on Wealth Formula Banking changes that are occurring because of current tax legislation. PLEASE LISTEN NOW!

It's not easy becoming a physician. You have to be at the top of your class in college to get into medical school. Then medical school itself is a pretty big commitment. Of course, I'm one of those crazies who added 7 years of residency training to my education. But by the time you get done with all of that training, you really do get an opportunity to master a body of knowledge. And while medicine is always changing, what we know about human physiology doesn't change much these days—at least the basics. You know that the heart has to keep beating and your brain needs to keep functioning to live. You know that it's better not to be obese and that cigarettes are bad for your health for a myriad of reasons. There is some beauty in knowing the consistencies of the human body—that despite the fact that futuristic medicine is on the way and will change the way we live, the basic knowledge of form and function of the human body remains constant. That makes it easier as a practitioner. Now if you are on the diagnostic side of the economy, it's a little different. What financial diagnosticians, aka economists, use as the core principles to predict the health and well-being of the economy are in flux. The rules are changing rapidly. This has made it much easier to predict the rhythm of the heart than the future pulse of the economy. It used to be that the United States Federal Reserve Bank had two mandates: to maximize employment and to stabilize prices. It typically did not respond to the whims of the financial markets. In other words, if the heart stopped on the New York Stock Exchange, stocks would get crushed and there would be no immediate resuscitative effort by the federal government or the Fed. Now, the rules seem a little different. The Fed artificially suppresses interest rates and responds briskly to any potential downturn. The Fed responds to what's going on in the stock market—emboldening people to continue investing even during the pandemic when it made no sense to have sky-high asset prices. The net result, in my view, is that whatever rules we played by in the past don't matter anymore. It's a free for all. We are living in times characterized by an artificial economy without natural cycles or anything else that you could previously use to forecast its future. And let me be clear, I'm not imposing my ideology here. I'm simply making an observation of the way I believe things actually are. On a recent episode of Wealth Formula, Marin Katusa made the point that as investors, our job is not to be stuck in dogmatic positions because of our beliefs. It is to respond to the reality on the ground. So with this chaotic new economic paradigm, it is interesting to speak to someone from the economic old guard. Dennis Gartman is famous for his Gartman Letters that he consistently wrote since the early 1970s until just recently. In this episode of Wealth Formula Podcast, I discuss what Dennis thinks is going on in the current economy and what his predictions are for the coming years—especially in light of what is an obvious new world economic order. Listen HERE.

I am a natural entrepreneur. It's not something I tried to be. I'm just wired this way. School does not teach you to be an entrepreneur. However, there is no doubt that certain subjects parallel my thinking as an entrepreneur. It may surprise you to know that the classes I took that most resemble my way of entrepreneurial thinking, were in the area of organic chemistry. Higher level organic chemistry relies on integrating the knowledge of how chemicals interact in order to create new relationships. My organic chemistry exams typically consisted of just a couple of exercises. There would be an image of one complex molecular structure and then another more complex molecular structure. The exercise would be to use all of the chemical reactions that I learned as tools to help me figure out the appropriate reactions in appropriate sequence to make one structure out of the other. There were often multiple ways of doing it. You just had to prove that the way you got to your destination was supported by all of the chemical interactions that were possible. It was challenging for sure. In fact, organic chemistry is considered the primary "weeder" class for pre-med students. Most people didn't like it much. I was one of those odd balls who really liked organic chemistry and excelled at it. In fact, my campus job for two years in college was to serve as an organic chemistry tutor. I loved the idea of solving complex problems via logical progressive reactions. There was a certain creativity about it that I now find in my entrepreneurial life. In organic chemistry, the primary limitations of the problems I could solve were chemical reactions, with which I was not familiar. If I had the knowledge of a reaction, it served as a tool for solving problems. If I wasn't aware of the tools that I needed, then I couldn't solve the problem. There is an interesting parallel with that limitation in the entrepreneurial world. First, you have to recognize a problem. You have to at least be exposed to it. If you don't have any exposure in a particular field, then you don't know what the problems and inefficiencies are. That is to say, if you are in the medical field, you know what the problems that need to be solved are because you are confronted with them every day. Where there is a problem, there is a business. However, someone with an entrepreneurial mind can only solve that problem if he is familiar with that specific inefficiency in the medical field. He may be the guy to solve the problem, but he will never know it. Therefore, I contend that the best thing for an entrepreneur to do is to learn about as much stuff as he can in hopes of finding problems. The benefit of broad education spanning multiple fields, is the ability to use tools acquired in one field to tackle problems in others. In organic chemistry parlance this would be akin to learning more chemical reactions to solve different kinds of organic chemistry problems. These days, my entrepreneurial spirit is focused on investing. You know by now that most of the time, I like to keep it boring. Apartment buildings and self-storage are things that people need and will continue to need in the foreseeable future. However, as an investor, it would be foolish for me to not pay attention to technology. Wouldn't it have been great to get in early on the internet? What about blockchain? I started talking to you about bitcoin and blockchain in 2017 when I discovered it for myself. Many of you benefitted from those podcasts significantly through the financial gains we have seen in that arena since then. But what if we got in just a couple years earlier? So what should we be paying attention to now? I think the next major technology disruption will be in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). We are already seeing it play out in real time. But believe me, we haven't seen anything yet. AI may be the single biggest technology disruption the world will see in the next decade. We need to pay attention to it. It will change our lives in ways that we can't even imagine. And when you are aware of that kind of disruption on the horizon, you have an opportunity to make a lot of money along the way. Martin Ford is one of the world's leading experts on Artificial Intelligence and is my guest on this week's episode of Wealth Formula Podcast. You won't want to miss this interview! Listen HERE!

At our Wealth Formula meetup in Dallas a few weeks ago my CPA, Tom Wheelwright, got up on stage and surprised me. Tom is a very smart guy. He wrote one of the books that I consider a "must read" for personal finance called Tax Free Wealth. He is the Michael Jordan of CPA's. He has several high profile clients including Robert Kiyosaki and is Robert's Rich Dad Advisor on taxes. I thought I had read up on or been exposed to just about every strategy Tom taught, but then he got up on stage and completely caught me off guard with a structure I hadn't before seen. It solves one of the biggest questions that high earning business owners have—how to turn active income into passive income. Of course, being able to use depreciation losses from real estate is a tremendous advantage. But if you are not a real estate professional, you can't use those passive losses against your active income. But…if you can figure out how to turn that active income into passive income, then you can benefit from all of those tax advantages that real estate provides against your earned income. Tom got up on stage and drew out a structure that not only showed the way to convert active income into passive income, but also showed how to do it while creating bullet proof asset protection and estate planning benefits that would survive even if the current tax legislation passed in entirety. Not bad right? Well, after that talk, I got a lot of questions about how this all worked so I decided to ask Tom to come on our show and explain it to all of our Wealth Formula community. And lucky for us…he agreed. Curious on how it works? Make sure to tune into this week's Wealth Formula Podcast!

Economics is a social science. While science is knowledge and application of existing aspects of the world and applications through physical laws, mathematics and research, social sciences deal with society and human behaviors. Certainly there is plenty of math involved in economics but the math is predictive insofar as the behavior is predicted correctly. That is not an easy task when trying to predict things like the way the Chinese government will react to an internal crisis. That's why very smart economists often disagree with each other all the time. The disagreements are not insignificant either. One might predict hyperinflation while another predicts deflation. One might predict a decade of prosperity while the other predicts an outright depression. I am not an economist, I am an investor. In that role, I pay attention to as much as I can understand and make my own conclusions on how to proceed with my money. If I followed a gold-shilling Austrian economist to make investment decisions over the last decade, my wealth would be a standard deviation or more below where it is right now. That said, the reality of all these predictions is that someone is usually right. While you might not be able to predict the future, you should be aware of what's going on and make decisions based on knowledge rather than emotion alone. A good example of economists disagreeing is playing out right now. China's largest real estate development company, Evergrande, looks like it is about to go bankrupt. If you were at our meetup last week, economist Ryan Davis felt that the fallout would be isolated to Chinese banks. My guest on Wealth Formula Podcast this week, Richard Duncan, does not buy that. He is far more concerned about the global ripple effects of default from this behemoth company. Make sure to tune in to this week's Wealth Formula Podcast to get his perspective!

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." -Yogi Berra The residential real estate market is on fire. No doubt. We are seeing this across the board from single-family homes to massive apartment complexes. I'm not an expert on single-family home values. I don't understand them as they are not rooted in cap rates etc. However, I can comment on larger residential real estate. Cap rates have gone down primarily because of mortgage interest rates being at historic lows. This is just math. Leverage only works if the money you borrow at is less than the cap rate. Otherwise, you are leveraging losses, not profits. So the question I often get from investors is, "What if interest rates go up?" It's a good question but we have to understand that no component of the economy happens in a vacuum. Cap rates are low because interest rates are low. Interest rates are low to avoid asset deflation. The fed is controlling mortgage interest rates by buying up 10 year treasury bonds. The 10 year treasury typically reflects inflation. If it goes up, that means we've got inflation on the horizon. So, even if cap rates go up following increased mortgage interest rates, we should be able to raise our rents to match that inflation and offset the negative impact on us as sellers with increasing cap rates. That's why I consider apartment complexes a hedge against inflation. But the reality is that the economy is pretty darn fragile right now. The likelihood of the Federal Reserve allowing interest rates to naturally rise seems unlikely as any downward trends in the economy would likely result in a knee-jerk response and economic stimulation. Of course, I could be wrong, but my personal feeling is that we have a runway of a good 5 years or more before the party ends. So what to do? I'll tell you what I'm doing. I'm doing what I always do. I'm investing in value-add real estate that does not rely on market appreciation to be profitable. If the market keeps heading north, then great. If not, it's not the end of the world. We still have equity that we force through our value-add programs. The bottom line, in my view, is that a reasonable approach is to continue to volume average into your investments. Not investing in an inflationary environment guarantees the loss of your buying power so you don't have a lot of choices. But my friend Jorge Newbery is trying to give us a few more choices. He's a little less enthusiastic about the market over the next few years and is hedging his bets in a different way. On this week's Wealth Formula Podcast, Jorge gives us his perspective on the real estate market and his formula to come out ahead in this economy either way. Listen HERE

Personal finance is personal. However, there is a type of conventional financial wisdom that leads us to believe that there is one right way of doing things. That becomes very confusing to people…especially in our alternative investment world. After all, financial advisors are the experts, right? In reality, financial advisors are usually most interested in your money going into traditional investments such as stocks, bonds and mutual funds so that they can charge you for assets under management. I'm not vilifying them for it. It's just the way it is. Furthermore, traditional advisors tend to know very little about our world of real estate and other tangible assets. There are some out there who offer coaching as a way to navigate the alternative space. But in my experience, these coaches are not wealthy. After all, one-on-one coaching takes a lot of time. If you are really wealthy, would you spend your time coaching or focusing on what makes you a lot of money? Whenever I try to learn something new in this space, I try to learn from people who are wealthier than I am. I don't take financial advice from people with less money than me. I am unaware of anyone who makes more money than most of us who is offering one on one coaching. So, what do you do? It's a very good question. To me, the single best resource for learning personal finance in the alternative space is through peer groups. As you may know, we have our own private peer group called Wealth Formula Network. I can honestly say that I have learned more from this group over the past few years than any other resource. Collective intelligence is very powerful. If you have friends and family of like mind that can help you navigate through this space and feel confident, then good for you. Otherwise, I strongly suggest you consider finding a group of peers for collective learning. There simply is no better way to increase your financial IQ and to feel confident about your decisions. Ask questions. Don't be afraid because someone else will likely have the same question, but is afraid to ask for fear of looking stupid. But everyone has the same questions at some point in their journey. Speaking of questions, this week's episode of Wealth Formula Podcast begins the latest series in our "Ask Buck" episodes. Make sure to tune in as we have got some great topics. I can pretty much guarantee you will learn something. I know I did! P.S. If you want to submit your question to the show, click HERE!

When I first read The Cash Flow Quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki (the purple pill), I was fascinated by the concept of using earned income to produce streams of passive income, that would eventually become a great river that would replace ones earned income all together. That concept is what I now call Wealth 1.0. You see, while the concept is appealing, the math is not. Let's do some simple arithmetic to understand the challenge. Say for example you make 500K per year. Let's assume that at a 30 percent tax rate, that leaves you with $350K. Let's be generous here and say that, out of that remaining $350K, you invest $200K per year into something that yields a consistent 8 percent cash on cash. How much would you have to deploy to replace your $500K? (.08x=500,000). The answer is $6,250,000. If are investing $200K per year, how long would that take you? It would take you about 31.25 years. By that time, with inflation, your 500K wouldn't be worth nearly as much as it is today. Ok, I know this is a very simplified model, but I think you get the point. Linear cash flow growth is not particularly efficient. When I realized that, I knew there had to be a better way. That better way is what I call Wealth 2.0 and can be described with the mathematical Wealth Formula: Wealth=Leverage(MassXVelocity) Mass is simply how much you invest. In the above example, if you invested $400K per year, you would get there in half the time. Velocity is the amount of time it takes to get your money back from your initial investment and redeploy into the next opportunity. Leverage is good debt. We can amplify our results with using bank money or anything else that can lever our investments. Practically speaking, significant growth in your wealth can be obtained by deploying as much capital as possible into leveraged assets that can quickly be refinanced or divested. This allows you to recycle capital rather than simply using new earned income to grow your wealth. A well-known example in our investor club is from an early investor with Western Wealth Capital who deployed a total of $750K across multiple offerings. Through a series of refinances and divestments with quick redeployment of capital, his principal is now worth over $4 million. In our earlier example of Wealth 1.0, had he simply gotten 8 percent on that initial 750K, he would be looking at about $60,000 per year. But now, if he deployed that $4 million into simple 8 percent cash on cash investments, he would be making $320,000 per year. The idea is to grow that principal rapidly until you are ready to flip the switch into linear cash flow. Again, I know the modeling is simplistic but it is illustrative of the power of a Wealth 2.0 model. The difference between the two approaches is the difference between checkers and 3-dimensional chess. Of course, this is not to diminish the value of straight up cash flow investments. You may want to have some of those in your portfolio as well. Mailbox money does certainly make you feel good. Speaking of cash flow, my guest on this week's Wealth Formula Podcast spends a lot of his time looking into cash flow investments. His name is MC Laubscher aka the Cash Flow Ninja. Make sure to tune in to this week's podcast to hear what he has to say on the topic! Listen HERE

There is a saying, "People grossly over-estimate what they can accomplish in a year and grossly under-estimate what they can accomplish over five years." As I write this to you on my 48th birthday (September 8th), I look back on the last 5 years and it's hard to argue the point. Five years ago, this podcast did not exist. Today, Wealth Formula Podcast gets about 25K-30K downloads per month and we have an Investor Club with over 2000 members that control over $800 million in assets. I am in awe of what we have created together. But the bigger lesson here is that even though it may not seem like it, all the little things you are doing now DO make a difference over time. If you don't like change, you are out of luck. Change is inevitable in life. You can either fight it or guide it in the direction you want to go. The same can be said about investing. The type of investing we do in our community requires planting seeds today and waiting patiently for a few years in most cases. Just think about those people who sat on the sidelines over the past 5-6 years while Western Wealth Capital delivered average annualized returns of over 30 percent to its investors. Indeed, time IS money. Understand that investing in real estate requires some level of faith. You can't track your net worth daily on an app. However, once you are in it a few years, you start to see things come to fruition in a big way. Once you've been through the cycle a few times, it really gets exciting. But again, the choices and investments you make today are for 3-5 years from now. The longer you wait to start, the longer it will take to get results. It's time to get off the sidelines. While you take action today, it is also important to keep contemplating your next move for the future. In my case, I have been interested in the hotel industry for a while and have been collecting data and looking for the most opportune time to get involved. On this week's Wealth Formula Podcast, I reconnect with hotel broker, Steve Usher, to get an update on the hotel investing landscape. Listen in as I get the scoop on whether it's time to buy!

As a flaming entrepreneur, I had a serious problem when I was a young man: Shiny Object Syndrome. After surgical residency, I had a couple of major business successes. Having never failed in business before, I kept pushing the limits. It wasn't about the money back then. You see, natural entrepreneurs like me enjoy money—no doubt. But we use it mostly as a way to keep score. If you create a successful business, you make money. That means you win the game. If you don't make money, you lose. At first it wasn't a big deal. I was tinkering with businesses that were costing me thousands of dollars but I was already making seven figures. Then, I made a major mistake. I pushed the limits on the goose that was laying the golden eggs. I tried to expand a highly successful business way too fast while financing it entirely myself. It was a big gamble. In fact, had I won that one, it would have been game over. But I lost. And losing this one was a big deal because I killed that gold laying goose! I was millions of dollars in debt and things only seemed to get worse (it's a long story). In fact, the reason I survived that big mess was because of something boring I was doing on the side. You see my dad has been a real estate investor all his life. I grew up thinking that real estate was the only conservative investment. So while I was tinkering with shiny objects, I also decided I would buy apartment buildings like a grown-up the way I was taught. Admittedly there was some luck involved, but the buildings I bought during those early years ended up yielding about 500 percent return in less than 5 years—enough for me to sell them and bail myself out of the big mess I had made. The whole thing was a big lesson for me. Sure I saw cash flow from those buildings but I only truly appreciated the equity growth that had occurred at divestment. It was a real eye opener. Too bad I had to spend it all paying off the sins of bad decisions made by me and my management team. This all happened pretty quickly after residency so I was fortunate to have plenty of time to recover and re-build myself. When I retired from medicine and became a full time investor 4 years ago, I still had to control my impulses. Shiny objects existed not only in the business world but with investments as well. I made some stupid investments in exotic things early on as well but quickly learned that the only asset class that was consistently making me money was real estate. I had to keep repeating a mantra to myself that I continue to do every day: "boring is good". There is nothing sexy about working class apartment buildings. You're not going to brag to your friends about owning them or drive by them with a ton of pride. They are often ugly and in areas you might not even want to drive through. But in the right hands, they consistently make money. In many cases, the returns themselves are quite sexy. My lifetime annualized returns on real estate are probably 40-50 percent all in. So, even though it seems boring, every year the vast majority of my investable income goes into apartment buildings. Do I invest in riskier stuff? Yes but it's calculated. 10-15 percent of my investable assets now go into things that could potentially create a meaningful change in my quality of life. What's a meaningful change? Well, it's going to be different for everyone but it usually means adding some zeros to your net worth. On the other hand, I approach those investments knowing and being ok with the possibility that there will be no return of capital at all—like the Maserati I bought last year. There are some people, however, who make their living entirely on the asymmetric side of the investment world. This week's episode of Wealth Formula Podcast features one of those guys: Jonathan Hung. If you are curious about the world of angel investing, make sure you tune into the show!

Henry Ford once said, "Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right". The older I get, the more I am convinced that he was right! I believe that mindset is the single most important element to success in life—be it financial or otherwise. Mindset is a broad term but the way I think about it is as a thermostat for your expectations of the world. In my experience, there certainly is a wealth thermostat. You are highly unlikely to make a lot more money than you think you can. You are also highly unlikely to make a lot less. Part of thinking you can involves what you visualize for yourself everyday. What do I mean by visualize? I'm not talking about meditating or doing anything else other than what we do everyday on autopilot that results in various images of who we are in our mind's eye. If you are around a bunch of people who make a lot more money than you do on a daily basis, you are more likely to see yourself in that position. If you know people personally who have accomplished various exceptional milestones your subconscious will be more likely to allow you to accept that you, too, can achieve such things. A wealth mindset is a prerequisite to actual financial wealth. That doesn't mean that you will get there for sure if you can see it. But if you don't, you can be pretty sure you will never get there. If the world around you isn't pushing you, you need to find other stimuli that do. That's where a lot of people who actively manifest their futures use image boards and other tools to train their subconscious. I don't actually do that myself but I certainly understand how it might help. I'm not an expert on mindset nor am I a coach of any kind. I'm just an armchair quarterback with some observations. My guest on this week's podcast is Kim Daly—and she is sort of an expert at this mindset stuff. Kim is also known best as an expert on franchises. That's a pretty good combination because, if you want to succeed as a business owner, you have to really focus on the mental part as well. Kim's enthusiasm is infectious. If you want to learn about franchises or just how to be a more fulfilled person, make sure to listen to my interview with her on this week's Wealth Formula Podcast. P.S. Don't forget to sign up for our Wealth Formula Meetup in Dallas on Oct 1-2. Click HERE to learn more!

Once you realize how much you don't know, you always feel like you're playing catch up. At least that's how I feel when it comes to personal finance. Wealthy families often implement family offices to help keep things straight. Theoretically, that's a great solution. However, from what I've seen, family office structures often leave clients with a false sense of security. No matter what your level of wealth, YOU need to be the CEO of your own finances. No one else cares as much about your money and your legacy. What that means is that you need to be educated on personal finance one way or another if you are going to be successful in this realm. For most high-paid professionals that means not only surrounding yourself with competent CPAs, lawyers, and investment advisors. It also means being active in designing strategies and making sure they get implemented. I have one of the best CPAs in the world but I am far from passive in my interactions with him. I'm constantly challenging him and providing him with new ideas. After all, I know my finances better than he does. And every time I acquire a new asset or make a new investment, I have to be the one who understands how it fits into my portfolio. It can be exhausting at times but at least I can be confident in the decisions I make. That's why so many people find Wealth Formula Podcast to be a useful resource. This is a platform for me to learn about things and share them with you in real time. Nothing about the show is theoretical. It's the information I use every day in my own financial affairs. Because of that, you often hear from my advisors. After all, what better way for me to communicate these concepts to you than having you listen in to the conversations that guide my own decisions? This week's episode features one of those discussions as I chat with my own asset protection attorney, Doug Lodmell. I highly encourage you to listen. This might be the most comprehensive but understandable podcast on the topic of asset protection you've ever heard and, hopefully, will leave you with a clear understanding of what you need to do in this area right now.

Over the last three weeks, you have heard actual members of our Wealth Formula Community talk about their financial journeys. A recurrent theme through these interviews was the concept of Wealth Formula Banking. In case you didn't notice, all three of these individual investors are essentially using Wealth Formula Banking as the cornerstone of their investor strategies. You might, therefore, be wondering what exactly Wealth Formula Banking is. Well, it's actually an investing strategy that utilizes permanent life insurance. Now you might be thinking: "My financial advisor told me to buy term and invest the rest". Believe me, I've heard that one a million times. In fact, I used to believe it. But then, during my own financial journey, I noticed that pretty much all of the high net worth individuals that I met were utilizing some kind of permanent life insurance in their own portfolios. If permanent life insurance was not a good strategy, then why were all of these smart people who made a lot more money than most doctors doing it? After some digging, I had the answer. Permanent life insurance, the way it is presented to most people, is not a good strategy at all. However, the devil is in the details. Structured appropriately—-maximizing cash value and minimizing fees, these policies are extraordinarily powerful in amplifying wealth creation. Perhaps the best book on this concept is written by Nelson Nash called Become Your Own Banker. This is an older book but drives home the fundamentals of this wealth-building concept in an easy to understand format. Nash's concept is further optimized for active investors by the Wealth Formula Banking concept. In short, Wealth Formula Banking involves an asset protected, tax efficient vehicle that allows you to invest the same money in two places at the same time. We call that double-dipping. And while it may sound too good to be true, I can tell you from my own personal experience that it's not. That's why, at the very least, you need to learn about it and decide if it's right for you. There is no better way to do that than to hear fellow Wealth Formula community members like you discuss the concept and how they are using it in their own portfolios. So… that's what we are going to do on this week's episode of Wealth Formula Podcast. LISTEN NOW!

In June of 2008, I had just completed my surgical residency and gotten married the day after graduation. There was already quite a bit of change in my life. On the way back from my honeymoon, I looked for something to read in at the Puerto Vallarta airport—not many choices as you can imagine. Most people heading back stateside are too hung over to read on the plane. There on the shelf, I grabbed one of the three available books and the only one that did not have a picture of buff dude with long hair appealing to romance novel enthusiasts. It was called Cash Flow Quadrant and the author was, of course, Robert Kiyosaki. I read that book on the plane and my life has never been the same. I've heard lots of stories like this over the years. Something about Kiyosaki's way of explaining concepts really inspires people. To this day, I am quite sure that he has been the impetus behind more millionaires around the world than any other individual in history. The funny thing is that some of those concepts that resonated with me like "cash flow" were nothing new. My dad used to call himself a cash flow investor long before Kiyosaki wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad. The point is that sometimes it's not about what is said but how it's said that matters. Guys like Kiyosaki know how to communicate important concepts. When that happens, you can get quite an aha moment that sends you down a rabbit hole. After reading Rich Dad Poor Dad, Ryan Stieg set out on his journey to figure out how to make sense of his own purple book experience. Part of that journey led him to the Wealth Formula Community. On this week's Wealth Formula Podcast, he takes us down his path from W2 wage earner towards his trajectory as a full-time investor. Ryan's story could sound a lot like your own if you want it to! LISTEN NOW!

"Coming out of left field" is a slang derived from baseball which basically references something unexpected. What does that equate to in personal finance? Well, the opposite of something unexpected would be something expected or… conventional. Conventional financial wisdom includes stocks, bonds, and mutual funds as the foundation of a solid, responsible portfolio. Conventional finance has even labeled investments out of this core set of products as alternative. I wonder why? Well, when you think alternative, what kinds of images pop up in your mind? Purple hair? Nose rings? Well, that's not by accident. The conventional financial apparatus would like investors to think of investing in real estate and other non-paper assets the same way you might think of those alternative images: unstable, unsafe? It's a rather clever use of language for marketing purposes I must say. But it's disingenuous all the same. After all, how could real estate be an alternative investment? The ownership of real estate and other real assets far outdate the more modern phenomenon of paper assets and certainly any kind of public equity market. Owning stuff is the only way investing existed just a few hundred years ago! Nevertheless, I can't tell you the number of times I've witnessed genuine anxiety from investors first realizing that they ought to be investing another way other than the way they had been conditioned their whole life. I get it. That's what our alternative investing communities, like Wealth Formula Network are for. We are kind of like support groups for recovering paper asset investors and we provide each other the support and courage to do what is in our own financial interests. Of course, ours isn't the only support group (or cult) out there. Jim Pfeifer's Left Field Investors is another one. It just so happens that he's part of our community as well. Listen to this week's episode Wealth Formula Podcast to learn how Jim's journey from high school teacher to financial advisor ended up leading him into podcasting and a career as a full-time investor. These intra-community shows are a great chance to reflect on your own financial journey. Make sure to listen NOW.

In the last few episodes of Wealth Formula Podcast, we have had some serious specialists in the area of Real Estate and Natural Resources. These shows are important because you, as an investor, need to know what's going on out there so you can make educated decisions about where to deploy your capital. Solid information from experts is important, but the actual implementation of personal finance strategies is often daunting for individual investors in the alternative space. If you follow the conventional financial path, it's easy. You just keep dumping your hard-earned money into stocks, bonds, and mutual funds and help your financial advisor retire comfortably. However, easy does not mean wise. Blind faith in conventional financial wisdom can be hazardous to your financial health and catastrophic for your retirement plans. In my 47 years of life, I have come to realize that nothing worth doing is ever easy. Taking charge of your own finances requires some work. The good news is that, if you are a listener of Wealth Formula Podcast, you are probably already a high-paid professional doing something that requires a great deal more brain power than personal finance. Yes. Managing your own money takes work but it's not that difficult. In fact, the hardest part is overcoming the fear of making the wrong decisions. That said, letting someone else make those decisions for you doesn't guarantee success either. The reality is that if you are managing your own money, at least you know for sure that the decisions you make are in your own interest and they are decisions you made. So how do you become confident about making your own financial decisions? Well, for one thing, it takes some time. The only way I know how to speed up the process is by learning from others. And it's not just the good stuff you need to learn either. It is true that the best way to learn is through mistakes. However, they don't need to be your mistakes. Learning through your peers is priceless. That's why the next few episodes of Wealth Formula Podcast will feature interviews with real investors just like you. This week I interview a guy who worked for Boeing for three decades and went through a divorce before his personal finance journey really took off. That's real stuff. So if you're curious about the financial journeys of your Wealth Formula peers, make sure to listen to this interview and learn why Chris Odegard now feels more confident than ever in his financial future!

The real estate podcast ecosystem is full of contrarians. Somehow we got mixed up in a crowd full of Austrian economic dogmatics and we constantly hear that the sky is falling. They tell us that the Zombie Apocalypse is near and that you should load up on precious metals (because everyone knows zombies only accept silver coins). Usually this group is at odds with mainstream economists. They rarely agree on anything—except when it comes to one thing: The Demise of America. Why? Ultimately it all comes down to a fact that no one can ignore. US sovereign debt is skyrocketing. We are spending at an unparalleled pace and that should result in the weakening of the dollar that will render it useless. Makes sense right? As you may know from past podcasts, I don't believe that America is going anywhere. I'm as bullish on our economy as I have ever been. We still have the largest economy in the world. American ingenuity is still unrivaled globally. And, as far as the dollar? It's still by far and away the least ugly currency in the room. I'm not denying we have problems. We do. But we are the 900-pound gorilla in the world arena. Our adversaries don't like that but we have the gravitas to keep it that way by exerting our geopolitical and economic weight at will. This week on Wealth Formula Podcast, I interview a guy who will explain why. His name is Marin Katusa and he is the author of The Rise of America: Remaking the World Order. This is a MUST READ for anyone interested in the future of the American economy. And to be clear, this is not coming from another talking head academic. While Marin is an ex-calculus teacher, he is also a self-made millionaire that has relied on significant research and clear-headed thinking to get him where he is. Do yourself a favor and listen to this podcast AND read his book.

We talk about a lot of concepts on Wealth Formula Podcast related to personal finance and sometimes it can be overwhelming: especially for the newbies in our community. So let me summarize the basics. First, make sure you are protecting your family against the economic fall out of unexpected death. Estate planning, including life insurance, is critical. I am a firm advocate of cash value life insurance such as Wealth Formula Banking to also allow your defensive moves like insurance to help you amplify your wealth. Next you need asset protection. You don't want to be a lawsuit or creditor away from bankruptcy. Cover your assets as they say. Get in touch with someone like my attorney, Doug Lodmell, sooner rather than later. Finally, the Wealth Formula ethos is to invest in real assets that not only make you money but also mitigate your tax burden. In my humble opinion, the ideal investment for this purpose is to invest in apartment buildings. I have searched high and low for investments that offer comparable yield with the same risk/benefit profile as investing in value-add working class apartment buildings in fast growing markets. I can't find anything that comes even close. Even real estate development doesn't really make sense to me right now. The yields are no better than what I'm getting on value-add apartment buildings with a fraction of the risk. We have also seen the resilience of apartment building investments in the hands of competent operators. Pandemics, deep recessions, and eviction moratoriums aside, we have fared quite well and investors are seeing that first hand. And now, we are out of immediate danger and the economy is growing at an incredible rate. Fiscal and monetary policy combined with pent-up demand for goods and services is creating an economic boom that, in my opinion, will be the second coming of the roaring 20s. I believe we are just at the beginning of one of the best times to make money in decades. I also believe that people who invest as much money now into real estate will be very happy in a few years if those properties are improved and managed competently. Sitting on the sidelines is a guaranteed way to lose money. Why? Well, along with that real economic growth, we are also going to see some significant inflation. Your money in the bank is, therefore, guaranteed to lose value. If you are in our accredited investor club, you are going to start seeing our rate of acquisition pick up quite a bit for all of the reasons cited above. It's GO TIME! To help you understand why that is, I interviewed Dave Steele, co-founder and principal of Western Wealth Capital. Dave has been in real estate for three decades and has been extraordinarily prescient in his forecasts. If you want to know why I think it's "go time", make sure to listen to this week's episode of Wealth Formula Podcast!

Everyone loves talking about how to make money. Those who are already making money love talking about how they can pay less taxes. But you know what almost no one likes to talk about?...what happens to that amassed fortune when you die. Of course, there are some like me who are ultra paranoid about controlling their legacy. The moment my first daughter was born, I made sure that I bought as much term life insurance as I could. It's the only way I knew to protect her in the event that something happened to me. That was 12 years ago and I was only a year out of surgical training. Since then, my personal wealth has grown substantially. It happened because of a lot of hard work and a few good breaks. God willing, I still have decades of life and wealth creation ahead of me. I'm creating this wealth for my family and for me. When I die, I want my hard-earned money to go to my children and perhaps to causes that I care about. I'm not doing this so that the government can take half of what I leave behind. If you don't start planning now, there is a reasonably good chance that's going to happen to you. I am talking, of course, about estate taxes. And if you think that you don't make enough money or have enough wealth to worry about this, you (or your family) could be in for an unfortunate surprise. Estate exemptions are as high as they have ever been and are very likely to be reduced to the point where the majority of individuals in our accredited investor group will be affected by the end of their life. In fact, current legislation has those exemptions as low as $3.5 million. If you listen to my podcast, there's probably a pretty good chance that you expect to have at least this much wealth accumulated by the end of your life. Just imagine for a moment that you have accumulated a decent portfolio of real estate that you would like to pass on to your heirs. If you don't plan correctly, your heirs will not get to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Instead, they will have to sell that real estate off just to pay the taxes on your estate. Unfortunately, very few people think about this stuff. I really think it's because people don't like to think about their own mortality. Some are even superstitious. I get it. However, If you're going to make the money anyway, don't you think it would be smart to structure your Wealth in such a way that your kids can continue to enjoy it when you're gone? Current legislation proposed by the Biden administration is trying very hard to make it virtually impossible for you to plan around estate taxes. Whether they are able to accomplish what they are trying to do or not remains uncertain. However, you do have a window of time right now in which you might be able to grandfather into current law. Believe me, this is something you ought to be thinking about NOW. To help you understand the issues at hand, I interviewed my own estate planning attorney, Joe Longo for this week's Wealth Formula Podcast. This is important. Please listen!

In recent years, I have made some pretty darn good bets that have made me a lot of money. Now I know you are thinking that I am referring to my investments. And you are correct. But I am not referring to financial investments. The investments that have made me the most money over the past few years are investments into relationships. One superpower that I have been blessed with is the ability to read people—what might be best characterized as "Spidey Sense". I am, of course, referring to Peter Parker and his web-slinging alter-ego's ability to sense imminent danger. By the way, I must give Wealth Formula Network member, Ian Kurth, credit for giving my superpower this name. As ridiculous as it may sound, I credit it for staying out of a lot bad deals and away from the many charlatans out there in the investment world. Don't get me wrong, early in my investment career I got burned too. In retrospect though, the signs were always there. If I had harnessed my senses better, I could have probably avoided those mistakes. To be clear, there is always risk in investing. There's always a chance you are going to lose money. I'm ok with that. As long as you win a lot more than you lose, you are going to do just fine. Believe me. The way you mitigate the losses, however, is to align yourself with competent individuals with high integrity. Know, like and trust are requirements for me when it comes to partnering or investing with anyone. However, they also have to be damn good at what they do. That's why the saying "your net worth is equal to your network" is so true. Having relationships with people who you trust and who are incredibly smart and good at what they do is absolute gold. For me that includes guys like Dave Steele, Tim McLeary and Dante Andrade. It also includes one of my favorite entrepreneurs and one of the smartest guys I know, Jorge Newberry. I can honestly say that whenever I have a problem, Jorge is one of the first guys I call. He knows his stuff and he's always got great wisdom to share. This week on Wealth Formula Podcast, Jorge updates us on the area that he knows best—the single family residential market. And…well, he sees some trouble on this horizon. Make sure to listen to why!

I remember when I got out of surgical training and started my new life as an adult (at 33 years old), I was terrified by anything related to audits or legal issues. Any time I got a letter from the IRS about anything, I broke out into cold sweats. Every time I got a letter from an attorney I would do the same—-even though most of those letters were actually advertisements. Now, 47 years old and owner of multiple businesses and complicated financials, I don't have visceral reactions to any of this stuff anymore. Why? Well, when it comes to taxes, I would venture to say that any business owner making a lot of money will likely get audited eventually. After all, what is an audit? An audit is an inspection. If you aren't doing anything wrong, then what are you worried about? I've been through three tax audits now. In all cases, I did nothing wrong. I broke no laws. The audits mostly focussed on documentation. In some cases, the documentation was not done as well as it could have and that's what the auditor wanted to focus on. In my experience, the tax audit process is just a negotiation. If you get audited, they are going to find SOMETHING no matter how ridiculous it may seem. Then you come to some kind of settlement. The legal system in general works on these principles. That's why I don't really fear frivolous lawsuits anymore. Very rarely do things go to court. The dirty little secret is that whoever has the most money usually wins disputes simply by draining the opposition of financial resources that cover legal fees. Once you realize that complexity of the real world, it's much easier to sleep at night with audits and legal issues. One more point. If you have good asset protection, that's another reason not to worry about frivolous lawsuits or even legitimate personal liability. Talk to my attorney friend Doug Lodmell about that one. But getting back to taxes, I want to emphasize that most of the tax code is gray and you need to have a quality tax professional on your side rather than a robot who just keeps telling you why "you can't do that". As you know, my CPA is Tom Wheelwright and I highly recommend you consider someone on Tom's Wealthability team. However, it's really good to get different perspectives as well. That's why this week's interview with tax attorney, Stephen Moskowitz was really eye opening for me. If you make a lot of money and worry about taxes and audits, you are not going to want to miss this episode of Wealth Formula Podcast!

One of the secrets to my own success as an investor has been to involve myself into a variety of tribes. What I mean by that is that I am around other intelligent, successful people who have a wealth of experience collectively as investors. For me, that has resulted in introductions to people with whom I have partnered over the years and who have made me money. It is important not to underestimate the power of collective intelligence. In saying that, I must make the distinction between collective intelligence and heard mentality. Herd mentality bias refers to the tendency of investors to follow what others are doing rather than by their own analysis. I differentiate that with collective intelligence where a group of individuals independently analyzes opportunities and vets them together. In other words, it involves having intelligent conversations with one another and coming to collective conclusions that might be more accurate than any individual one. A good example of this kind of tribe is our own Wealth Formula Network. This is our private community where we interact over Facebook and also do biweekly Zoom video calls. I think about personal finance a lot in case you haven't noticed. But I am not arrogant enough to think I know everything and I am also very open to changing my mind if people can convince me with good data. In that regard, Wealth Formula Network has been at least as valuable for me as anyone else in our group. On a more practical level, investment groups can sometimes allow you to participate in private offerings to which you might not otherwise have access. That's been a huge advantage for me I must say. Finally, investment "tribes" can actually make it possible for you to invest in more opportunities with limited resources. For example, you might be interested in opportunities for which minimum investments are $100K. If you want to invest in 7-8 opportunities in a year that's quite a bit of money. However, using the tribe model, my guest on Wealth Formula Podcast this week has figured out an ingenious way for you to participate with less money yet maintain the broad investment exposure you want. If you want to invest in more opportunities than you have money, you won't want to miss today's show with Tribevest founder, Travis Smith! P.S. If you decide to sign up for Travis' service with your tribe, go to TribeVest.com/wf and he will give you $50 to start. Use the code "BUCK50"

The US tax code is thousands of pages long. What could it possibly have to say for that many pages? Well, as it turns out, only a very small fraction of the pages are devoted to how much you are taxed. The majority of the tax code provides for ways you can potentially pay less tax. You see, the tax code is nothing more than a series of incentives. It is intended to direct your behavior and your investments. Case in point…for years, drilling for oil and gas on US shores has been an initiative of the US government. The idea was to make us oil independent from a bunch of Middle Eastern countries who don't like us very much. Reflective of that goal, investments in oil and gas drilling operations have been extremely advantageous to investors in terms of tax mitigation. In fact, for the last few years, up to 100 percent of oil and gas drilling investments have been deductible for investors. Well, as it turns out, the US became a net exporter of petroleum in September of 2019 meeting its goal to be oil independent. Then, the Biden administration took over in 2021 and made it clear that green energy was at the top of its agenda. So, if it is true that the tax code is a series of incentives, what kind of legislation do you think reflects the current administration's values? You might expect the end of all of those tax benefits for oil and gas replaced by green energy benefits. Well, as it turns out, that's what is on the table right now along with a series of other tax code changes that reflect the Biden administration's values. Sure we can complain about it. I certainly don't like a number of the proposals that we are seeing. But our job as investors is to continue understanding what the government wants us to do and to do it. That is…if we want to reduce our taxes. None of the legislation that has been offered is law as of yet. So, it's not quite time to panic. However, it is time to understand which way things are going and start preparing yourself. So, that's what we are going to do this week as we talk with my CPA, Tom Wheelwright. You don't want to miss this show!

Lots more questions to answer on this week's "Ask Buck"! This episode includes questions on life settlements, Wealth Formula Banking, passive income, asset protection, and more. Listen HERE!

This week's episode features a discussion with Ian Kurth—radiologist and highly sophisticated investor. Ian is a member of Wealth Formula Network and one of its major assets. He is doing exactly what, in my opinion, every high-paid professional ought to be doing. He has really transformed himself into a sophisticated investor and thought leader on personal finance for our demographic. The current discussion is inspired by a 90-minute Wealth Formula Network call around how to think about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. It's important to note that just a couple of years ago, Ian was a bitcoin skeptic. So you are going to want to understand how he has transformed into a very pro-bitcoin investor despite his conservative nature! Listen HERE! P.S. Ian has also compiled a list of resources that he has found helpful in his journey to becoming crypto-competent. He has kindly permitted me to share them below: Podcasts https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/bitcoin-fundamentals/page/2/ - Recommend starting with - (#1, #3, & #5 first - links below) #1 - https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/bitcoin-fundamentals/bitcoin-common-misconceptions-w-robert-breedlove/ #3 - https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/bitcoin-fundamentals/bitcoin-a-deflationary-world-w-jeff-booth/ #5 - https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/bitcoin-fundamentals/bitcoin-michael-saylor-a-masterclass-in-economic-calculation/ This is an outstanding 9 podcast series. Muscle through the sometimes amateur audio production quality. Michael Saylor is a visionary, who has overqualified background experience. - The "What is Money?" Show The Ultimate Bitcoin 101 with Vijay Boyapati What Bitcoin Did Tim Ferris Show - Balaji Srinivasan Many, many more podcasts are available depending on which direction down the rabbit hole you choose. YouTube BTC vs. Gold debate "The Best Bitcoin Debate Ever Recorded (Anthony Pompliano vs. Mike Green)" Michael Saylor - CNBC Ross Stevens (NYDIG) Articles The Bullish Case for Bitcoin The Case Against Bitcoin Why Bitcoin, The Series Norwegian Billionaire Investor Letter on Bitcoin Investment Illuminating the Path Forward - NYDIG Books The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking Inventing Bitcoin: The Technology Behind the First Truly Scarce and Decentralized Money Explained - Here is a referral code to download this book free: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/Kurthian?gc=yanbook1020&utm_campaign=yanbook1020 Bitcoin: Hard Money You Can't F*ck With: Why bitcoin will be the next global reserve currency Websites Case Bitcoin. Lots of solid info/compilations of news/articles/pricing https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information.html http://billybitco.in/ https://www.keepitsimplebitcoin.com/bitcoin-security-guide/ Graphs https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://www.lookintobitcoin.com/charts/stock-to-flow-model/ https://dcabtc.com/ Corporate custodianship and legal issues Microstrategy Corporate adoption conference Twitter Raoul Pal Preston Pysh Lyn Alden Plan B Willy Woo Robert Breedlove Greg Foss Buying Crypto If you decide to buy on a crypto exchange, I recommend coinbase PRO b/c it has the cheapest transaction fees. (https://www.coinbase.com/join/kurth_6) If you want to do daily buys at a cheaper trx fee, and then auto send to a cold storage device, I use Swan Bitcoin. I like to dollar cost average on a daily basis. https://www.swanbitcoin.com/Kurthian If you'd like to earn % interest on your bitcoin, you can explore BlockFI. You get some money for signing up. For other digital assets that are not on Coinbase Pro, I use Crypto.com. Use code 2grceqsvjv for $25. Voyager is decent for more exotic coins. https://www.bitwiseinvestments.com/ is a good private equity index type option that I have used since 2017. From a brokerage account, GBTC and ETHE are reasonable bitcoin proxy investments, particularly in qualified retirement accounts.

It's time for another round of "Ask Buck". This week's episode includes questions on Wealth Formula Banking, cryptocurrency, taxes and multifamily real estate investments. Listen HERE!

If you have been ignoring distributed ledger technology, you will regret it if you don't start paying attention. I understand why people get suspicious of the space. The cryptocurrency ecosystem is full of scammers and hype. Talk of "lambos" and "mooning" can hardly be taken seriously by sophisticated investors. But amidst the din, lies technology that will fundamentally transform the world. I see the current crypto market as very similar to what happened in the 90s with the dawn of the internet and related technology companies. Yes…most of the dotcoms went out of business. There was ridiculous hype and valuations of companies that had no revenue-generating product and certainly didn't even come close to making money. And when the dotcom crash came, the skeptics all said, "I told you so". Indeed, they were right about the hysteria. But if they ignored the technology completely, they also missed out on early investments into companies that would eventually become the largest companies in the world. Recovering from the ashes of the dotcom debacle were companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple to name a few. The dotcom period of the 90s was, therefore, hardly a failure. Cryptocurrency skeptics look at the current technology craze the same way. However, just like in the dotcom era, there will be some big winners that come out of the frenzy and will become household names. Don't you want a chance to be part of that?… to go back in time and invest in companies like Amazon and Google in their infancy? If so, you have to change your perspective on what's happening now. Try to weed through the useless stuff like dogecoin and start looking at these projects like you would look at any other project in which you might invest. Learn, at a high level, what this whole distributed world is all about and why it's such a big deal. Then learn about individual projects. Look at them like you would any other investment. Who are the developers? What is their mission? What do they aim to do and what have they already done? Cryptocurrency is not going away. Bitcoin is here to stay and will become a globally recognized commodity like gold someday. And while most other projects will die, others will become the fabric of a new decentralized world. As an investor, opportunities like these to be part of the new evolving economy don't happen very often and may never happen again in our lifetime. I recognize that and, while I have no idea who the winners and losers will be, I can tell you that Hedera (Hashgraph) is my personal pick for a company that will become a household name over the next few years. And, full disclaimer, its native token HBAR, is by far and away my biggest cryptocurrency bag. In this episode of Wealth Formula Podcast, you will learn why I'm so bullish on Hedera as I welcome back co-founder and CEO Mance Harmon to the show. Don't miss it!

It's time for our next series of "Ask Buck" episodes. These shows have become extremely popular over the years and, if you are new to the Wealth Formula community, are particularly useful to "catch up" on recurring themes in our world. Tune in now for the first "Ask Buck" episode of Q2!

I'm always fascinated by stories of entrepreneurs showing early signs of interest in the world of business as children. Warren Buffett was apparently inspired by a book he checked out from the Omaha library at the age of seven called: One Thousand Ways to Make $1000. He went on to pursue several childhood business ventures such as selling gum and Coca-Cola bottles and, of course, the rest is history. Stories like these attached to big-name entrepreneurs are fun to think about. And I certainly see some of my children's friends with unusual enthusiasm for making money at a young age. I can't wait to see what they do in the years ahead. However, my experience as an entrepreneur amongst entrepreneurs is that most of the time, the narrative doesn't quite go that way for entrepreneurs. What I have noticed is that most entrepreneurs stumbled their way into the world of business and surprised everyone around them, including themselves. I identify as an entrepreneur who happens to be a doctor. If someone looked at my childhood trajectory, I don't think they would guess that I would end up doing what I did. For one, I was a good student who fit well into the professional tract. The only question that someone might have had about me during high school or college is whether I would end up in law school, business school, or medical school like I actually did. The idea of entrepreneurship never crossed my mind. I was trying to figure out what kind of job that I wanted. It wasn't until accidentally stumbling upon Robert Kiyosaki's Cash Flow Quadrant that the idea of entrepreneurship ever crossed my mind. And boy did it…like a bolt of lightning. And while I don't agree with everything Robert says, I do owe him a debt of gratitude that, apart from my parents who brought me into this world, I owe no one. Now once you are in the entrepreneurial mindset, you can see opportunities everywhere. Not surprisingly, therefore, most entrepreneurs do what I did. They learn a business from somewhere that they are working and have that moment of clarity when they think to themselves: "I don't have to work for this guy. I'm doing all the work. I can make more money on my own" This, I guarantee you, is the number one on-ramp to entrepreneurship. Now, the interesting thing is that the type of business an individual typically pursues is often dumb luck. Let me give you a couple of examples to illustrate my point. One of my buddies has a tile company that supplies a bunch of major retailers like home depot. He does pretty well for himself. He makes a half million dollars a year and lives comfortably in a great place to live. This is a big deal considering the fact that he came from nothing. His story? Well, you guessed it. He worked for a tile guy who gave him all the responsibility while he played golf. My friend learned the business and started his own shop. Now another guy I know had a similar story. Except in his case, his job involved energy arbitrage. The company he worked for bought energy from countries where costs were less and sold it to countries where it was more expensive. Of course, that brokering came with a nice little commission on the trade—meaning millions of dollars per transaction. Well, one day this guy looked at his coworker and said, "You know, we could do this by ourselves.". And that's how he ended an entrepreneur. However, lucky for him, his job gave him the inside knowledge to execute a business that was quite a bit more lucrative than tiles or medicine. He didn't work harder than the rest of us and I don't think he was any smarter. He was just in the right place at the right time with the right mindset. When I think about these guys and myself, I can't help but think how random fortunes can be. I also think to myself whether there is a way to systematize this seemingly arbitrary reality of fate so that we can better guide our children. Based on what I've seen, the advice I have for any young person looking to find their way or their jackpot is to get as much exposure to life as possible. College teaches you some things, but it might be best as a resource for the people you meet. College graduates should look at their first few jobs after school as paid education. Furthermore, they should be quick to find other employment once they learn the skills available at that position. Not everyone aspires to be filthy rich, but anyone who has an interest in entrepreneurship should make sure that the business that they are going to rip off and make their own be lucrative. After all, working hard has very little correlation with being rich. I have three little girls-the oldest is only 12. Given my own interest in entrepreneurship and investing, people often ask me what I'm doing to provide them a financial education. Sure, we talk about money once in a while. I explain taxes to them by taking away half their ice cream..that kind of thing. But I think the best thing I can do for them right now is to simply encourage them to le

In case you didn't notice, we are in the middle of a massive cryptocurrency bull market. We haven't been here since 2017 and who knows how long it will last. For those of you with solid positions, enjoy the run but don't get greedy! I certainly learned my share of lessons from the last cryptocurrency bull run. I could have come away from it with a lot more money than I did if I had done things differently. However, like anything in life, investing is about learning from your mistakes and trying not to repeat them. Let me give you an example of one of the lessons I learned. In 2017 I invested in an initial coin (ICO) offering on a project that I liked. ICO's were all the rage back then but have since been banned by the SEC in the United States. I invested $50,000 into that project. One day the guy who told me about the project in the first place shot me a text that read "you must be happy you bought into that ICO!" Indeed, when I looked up the price of the token, my $50,000 was worth $4 million! Now there are times to buy and hold, but this was not one of them. That kind of profit on a token that really represented an idea more than anything else was a sell for sure in my humble opinion. The problem was that I couldn't sell. You see, first of all, the only platform where the token was trading was not open to Americans. My friend who texted me is Canadian so he didn't have that problem. So, for several months, I watched handcuffed as the euphoria around the project drained out. By the time it was on a platform where I could theoretically trade it, it was worth $500K. That was still 10X so nothing to scoff at. But then I ran into another problem. There was virtually no liquidity on the platform where I could trade it. In other words, the token I had may have been theoretically worth something, but there weren't any buyers. By the time the token was on sizable trading platforms available to Americans and had some liquidity, crypto winter was upon us. Soon, my $50K that was worth $4 million was worth only $20K. What a miserable story right? You're right but I can't say I ever let it bother me that much. This kind of stuff happens once in a while when you are an active investor or trader. The key is to learn something and don't repeat the mistake again. For those of you who are holding on to significant profits in alternative coins right now, make sure you can sell them if you want to. You might even consider very slowly moving out of the token into something traded on Coinbase where everything is liquid. Anyway, I thought I'd share that story with you for you to learn from my experience. Crypto is the wild west still, despite tons of added regulation. Have fun and try not to lose money. In frenzies like this, that is very easy to do. Speaking of frenzies, beware of charlatans in times like these. Just like last bull run, you are going to see a lot of unnecessary tokenization and random companies adding the word blockchain to what they do in order to create a buzz. Here's a case study: an iced tea company called Long Island Iced Tea. The company made beverages from 2015-2017. But suddenly, in December of 2017 at the peak of the crypto market, the company changed its name to Long Blockchain Corp. (LBCC). The company never really made its mark in anything related to blockchain and, in a press release stated, "there can be no assurance that the company will be successful in developing blockchain technology, or in profitably commercializing it, if developed." In other words—they were just using the name to pump the stock price. And sure enough, the share price increased by 500 percent! The moral of the story is that in times like these, it is important as ever to ask questions. Yes, I do believe blockchain and, more broadly, distributed ledger technology is the biggest technology advance since the internet. But make sure when you hear people using crypto terminology actually have a real purpose for it other than marketing. There certainly are some potential use cases. My guest on this week's Wealth Formula Podcast, for example, wants to securitize real estate ownership via security tokens. Does it make sense to do so? Well, listen to this interview and decide for yourself!

What gives something value? Gold has been considered valuable since ancient civilization. It has been used as money, as a store of value, and as jewelry. Gold is also scarce and it is not easy to mine. But…at the end of the day, gold is valuable because of a social construct that says it is and that it will continue to be going forward. The longevity of gold's claim to value certainly adds to its standing as a valuable asset. Gold bugs who disparage bitcoin often point to the relative newness of the asset and its lack of track record over time. However, if we are going to give so much inherent value to the variable of time, it might be reasonable to consider other assets that have been considered valuable for a long time. We have almost certainly been eating and drinking for longer than we have been hoarding precious metals. That's why we value rare foods the way we do. The European white truffle is a good example. They grow underground and need to be sniffed out by special dogs and pigs! They cannot be commercially cultivated. How much are people willing to pay for rare food? Well, in 2017, a two-pound specimen sold for $61,250. I love truffles but really? Anyway, I guess it doesn't matter whether you or I would spend that kind of money on a mushroom. Someone will and that's why European White truffles are so darn expensive. That brings us to something else that we know can get pretty pricey quickly—wine. I like wine but am certainly no connoisseur. I pretty much put wine in two categories—wine I like and wine I don't like. I know a little bit more about bourbon. Of course, buying and selling fancy wine has been, for the most part, for the wealthy. However, as we have seen recently in assets such as art and rare cars, technology is allowing for the democratization of many of the investments that were simply too expensive for most to participate in. Vinovest is doing just that for investment quality wine. So whether you're an investor or you just like drinking this stuff, you are going to want to tune in to my interview with Vinovest founder, Anthony Zhang, on this week's Wealth Formula Podcast.

The alternative investing podcast ecosystem is full of doom and gloom. It's always that way. Any time we get out of a recession and the economy gets a little hot, everyone's calling for the zombie apocalypse. They tell you to prepare for the worst because the zombies are coming. Start growing your own food and buy lots of precious metals. Because, of course, silver coins are the currency of choice for zombies. Eventually, the natural cycles do their thing and the economy does go south. That's when the doom and gloomers do their end-zone dance and tell you that they had predicted the down-turn the whole time. They are right. After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Now let me be clear. I understand that we live in unprecedented times of sovereign debt, record low interest rates, and the Federal Reserve is printing money at unparalleled levels. Oh yeah—and we have a hell of a demographic cliff coming up next decade. But… if you listened to the doom and gloom crowd for the last 6 years, you missed out on a lot of opportunities to make money. Case in point: our investor club partner Western Wealth Capital has been around for about 6-7 years. Over the last 6 years, one investor turned $750K of invested capital into over $4 million! Now compare that to how far gold has come since 2015. Yeah…no thanks. The reality is that the economy is dynamic and you have to make money when you can. If you're worried about a depression happening 10 years from now and stop making good investments today, you probably will not fare as well as someone who is actively growing their wealth right now. Building wealth creates resilience. Fear does not. But listen…if you listen to a lot of podcasts, I don't blame you for stashing gold under your bed. There's a lot of opportunistic financial forecasters out there telling you that the world is coming to an end...again. You know what I would love to see? I would love to see all economists, especially those who shill gold, provide a scorecard on their financial forecasts. My guess is that in most cases, those who predicted the last two recessions, would also be the ones who predicted 5 more recessions that didn't happen in between. If you're good at predicting the future, show us your track record, right? Well, as it turns out, there is one group of economists who have been keeping score since the mid 1940's and have predicted economic events with 97 percent accuracy since that time. Not surprisingly, they predict both good times and bad. That's the way the real world works! The firm is called ITR economics and I listen closely to everything they have to say. Maybe you should too. You can get started by listening to this week's Wealth Formula Podcast where I interview ITR economist, Taylor St. Germain. Learn about the pandemic economy and what's on the horizon over the next decade. Don't miss this show!

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." -Mike Tyson Life is full of surprises…both good and bad. The last 12 months were, to say the least, unexpected. Everyone has a different story. Hundreds of thousands of people died from Covid-19 and left even more people behind to mourn their loss. Businesses closed, people lost jobs and some experienced poverty for the first time. Marriages came to abrupt ends and kids couldn't go to school. But the funny thing is that, for those of us who survived, we seem to be doing ok. Human beings are incredibly resilient. And, as it turns out, can adapt to pretty much anything over time. I often talk about a certain kind of "wealth thermostat" that keeps people in a certain range of wealth. If you are a $100K person you will somehow find a way to make $100K per year but you won't make a million. If you are a $1 million per year person, you will find a way to make that amount etc. Unless you figure out how to reset your financial thermostat, you are kind of stuck where you are. As it turns out, there is also a "happiness thermostat". Most people think that more money will make them happier. But studies recently done suggest that's only true until you hit about $75K per year. If you can afford food and a roof over your head, you've covered the essentials to get to your baseline happiness. Lottery winners, as it turns out, aren't any happier than most people. The initial thrill of making a lot of money and being able to buy stuff seems to get old pretty quickly. In fact, studies show that they tend to rate the pleasure of mundane events of everyday life lower than others. On the other hand, people who get paralyzed in accidents don't seem to be any less happy than the general population after an initial period of mourning. The moral of the story is that we tend to get accustomed to pretty much anything in life that punches us in the face or gets handed to us on a silver platter. Happiness, it seems, exists outside of objective life circumstances. No matter what happens, we tend to drift back to where our happiness thermostats are set. How do we turn up the temperature on happiness in our lives? I wish I could answer that. In fact, a lot of people are trying to answer that question. The topic has spawned an entirely unique body of research which is called positive psychology. Joel Wade is an expert in positive psychology and he is my guest on Wealth Formula Podcast this week! Don't miss this interview. Listen NOW.

Value is a social construct. Things have value because we, as a society, agree that they are valuable. That is the only reason that gold has the value that it does. Yes, it has unique metallic qualities and it is scarce, but there is no intrinsic quality that gives it the value it has in society. We have collectively assigned that value to it. And to be clear, this is not intended to be a knock on gold or gold bugs. I am well aware of the value gold has kept since ancient civilization dating back from the Egyptians to the Inca. Longevity certainly matters. I am simply stating what I consider to be an obvious fact—monetary value is not intrinsic to any commodity. Yet, the perception of value in society serves an important function for accounting purposes. But why must we concede value only to ancient stuff? In a technological society like we have today, does it make sense to look only to the past for inefficient stores of value? I don't think so. That's one of the reasons why I believe that bitcoin will ultimately serve a similar role in society as gold. Bitcoin is finite, deflationary and you can't confiscate it. You can cross borders with billions of dollars by simply memorizing a series of numbers and letters. Robert Kiyosaki calls gold "God's money" and bitcoin "The people's money". That metaphor is golden! I began talking about bitcoin on Wealth Formula Podcast three years ago. Many of you got it then and took action. Some of you even made millions of dollars because of that introduction to cryptocurrency. To you I say…you're welcome! For those of you who still don't understand the significance of bitcoin, it's time to wake up. Bitcoin is here to stay and it will become increasingly mainstream over the next few years. Even if you don't have the appetite to buy bitcoin now you owe it to yourself to try and understand this phenomenon. This week's episode of Wealth Formula Podcast is critical for you to understand the future of money. My guest, Samson Mow, is recognized as one of the most influential bitcoin visionaries in the world and there is no one better to explain the past, present and future of this asset. Listen NOW!

I am not an economist but I do recognize the importance of understanding a little bit of macroeconomics to guide me as an investor. After all, financial markets don't move in a vacuum. They are affected by all sorts of things including monetary and fiscal policy. As a reminder, monetary policy is dictated by the Federal Reserve. Essentially, they have two powers that they can wield to impact the financial system. One is the power to set interest rates at which the banks trade with one another—the so-called "Fed Funds Rate." The other is the ability to print money and buy bonds—aka quantitative easing. Right now this monetary policy is as loose as it can be. With historically low interest rates and quantitative easing cranking away, the Fed is doing what it can to steer us out into a post-pandemic economy. While the Fed does its thing, the US Government and Treasury are responsible for fiscal policy—aka government spending. Obviously, that is also hard at work right now as demonstrated by the recent $1.9 trillion stimulus package. Simultaneously, household savings rates are high and there is enormous pent-up demand for spending that will presumably be unleashed late this summer and into the rest of the year as Covid-19 herd immunity becomes reality through vaccination efforts. All of the ingredients are there for an economic boom like we haven't seen in decades. The economy could really heat up and we could see some inflation. Historically the response of the Federal Reserve to a hot economy is to put on the brakes so that inflation does not get out of control. Raising interest rates and not printing money would be the steps that you might expect. But this time, it may be different. The Fed has changed its policy. In the past, the Fed has used a target inflation rate of 2 percent as a major indicator of when it needs to raise rates. But now the policy is to allow rates to overshoot 2 percent and to focus more on the average rate of inflation. In other words, if the economy heats up, they will let it boil! Low interest rates are critical to keep asset prices inflated. One of the misconceptions that people have is that the Fed Funds rate is the primary indicator for long-term loans like mortgages. That's actually not the case. Long-term mortgages are more correlated with the bond market—specifically the 10 year treasury. The bond market is complicated and I won't pretend to completely understand it myself. However, for simplicity just know that as the 10 year treasury rises, so will interest rates for your asset-based loans. Assets will sell off if the 10 year treasury spikes and that's what happened recently. That's why there was a huge sell-off in Tesla stock presumably. The 10 year treasury will naturally go up if the markets expect inflation. So if that's the case and the Fed wants to keep rates under control, what can it do? Well, remember quantitative easing is where the Fed creates money out of nothing. When it prints that money, it buys bonds like the 10 year treasury. If the Fed continues to buy treasuries, it can control the supply and demand and artificially suppress the yield on those bonds. That's what it's doing and what it plans on doing more of in the near future. So, the take-away I have from this news is that inflation is coming so don't sit on cash. That's a sure fire way of losing money as it loses value over time. I also interpret this as "go time". The economy is about to boom and I, for one, will position myself in the assets that will benefit from this explosion. Finally, expect this boom to last. The Fed and the Treasury are going to let the fireworks go on for a little bit longer than they normally do. That's it for my macroeconomic warm-up for the week. Now you are ready to listen to an economist talk about these issues and a lot more in this week's Wealth Formula Podcast. Listen NOW! P.S. My 11 year old daughter just released a song called "Worst Year Ever" that is available on all the streaming services such as Spotify and Itunes. She used the name Camilla Sabine (her middle name) in case you want to search for it. You can also check it out on Youtube at the following link: https://youtu.be/wUH_AN5kLGM I bet your kids will love it!

Life is not long enough to take advantage of the wisdom that comes with age. It's really kind of a cruel joke of nature if you think about it. You get smarter as the rest of your body becomes less functional and closer to death. This phenomenon really needs to be experienced in order to be believed. I recall listening to a young syndicator recently telling me that experience is over-rated. That's easy to think when you are, indeed, young and inexperienced. Experience does matter because, although history may not repeat itself, it most certainly rhymes. When you've been through a cycle or two you do have a little bit more insight compared to one who has not. Luckily for me, I'm not that old yet. However, I am in my late 40s and I am seeing patterns in the economy and investing that my younger peers are not. In fact, seeing these patterns come to fruition has made me realize how important it is to learn more history in order to compensate for the things that I have not yet seen. This unique type of intelligence we gain over time is what is called wisdom. Again, It's really hard to appreciate when you are young. I still remember my father telling me things when I was a teenager that I blew off as nonsense that I realized later in life were profoundly true. These days, when someone has been around longer than me and has wisdom to share, I listen. Wisdom is priceless and I, for one, cannot get enough of it. My friend Russell Gray doesn't look that old but boy does he have a lot of history to share and I always learn something from him. Hopefully you will too on this week's episode of Wealth Formula Podcast as I get a chance to reflect on the events of 2020 with Russ and contemplate on what happens next!

It's time for another episode of "Ask Buck"! This week, we field questions on the economy—inflation or deflation, interest rates, and cap rates. We also touch on two sides of the same concept—owning permanent life insurance either your own policy or one that you buy from someone else! Make sure you tune in!

Investing is hard. It's hard because you have to know what you are doing. But it's also hard because you have to be tough psychologically and sometimes do things that seem counterintuitive to your own emotions. Believe me, I'm not immune to psychological miscues. At one point, I owned about 100 bitcoin. But, during crypto winter, I needed some liquidity for another investment and sold most of it off for about a tenth of what it is worth today. I could have easily bought that bitcoin back a few months later but I didn't. Crypto winter took my mind off of what was obviously on sale. I KNEW that it was going to go back up. In fact, I just won a bet with someone from a year ago that Bitcoin would hit 50K by the end of 2021. So why didn't I listen to my own advice and buy more? Fear. Fear is a tricky thing and the major driver of investors losing money. And I'm not just talking about fear of investing when something is getting crushed like bitcoin was. I'm also talking about the opposite spectrum—the old FEAR OF MISSING OUT (FOMO) thing. FOMO is complicated. There is a cryptocurrency called Dogecoin. It recently skyrocketed. The problem is that there is nothing really behind Dogecoin. It's not a storage of value like bitcoin and it isn't a project like Ethereum that is used for creating software. It's kind of a joke and most people in crypto know it's a joke. Yet, people have been buying it because it's gone up so much in price. That's BAD FOMO. Because eventually, Dogecoin will go to zero. It's purely a game of magical crypto chairs at this point. Another scenario that often kills investors is the feeling that something has gotten too expensive despite the clear vision that it is not. What is behind that? Well, on May 16th, 1997 Amazon stock was at $1.73. Then, one year later it was over $7. If you were paying attention at that time, you might have thought that the opportunity to make money on Amazon stock was gone. The 700% percent appreciation in just one year just couldn't continue so why waste your money? Today, as I write this, amazon stock is sitting at $3278. People who understood the potential of amazon early on did very well and never sold even when the stock 10X'd over and over. For those of us who, unfortunately, did not get on the Amazon bus, we look at the price of that stock today and think—"man, that's pretty expensive. I'm not buying that". In my case, I'm not going to buy it because I just don't know enough about the potential upward trajectory of that company and stock at this point. It's just not smart for me to jump on the bandwagon now—that would be "bad FOMO" even if the stock keeps going up. I still believe that outside of some speculative plays that you should invest in things you understand. For me, what I understand best is multifamily real estate. People have made a lot of money in multifamily real estate for a very long time. And, in the past two decades, no market has had more winners than Dallas. The question is whether or not that trend continues. For me, it's an obvious yes! I will continue to invest heavily in working-class apartment buildings in Dallas for the foreseeable future even though it is more expensive today than it was five years ago. Like Amazon in the year 2000, Dallas is more expensive today than it was then. However, as a guy who understands what drives prices in real estate, I can see the clear path to continued growth in this market and resultant increase in asset values. To me, working-class apartment buildings in Dallas operated by competent hands is the single best risk-adjusted investment in the world. So, looking past a week of terrible weather out there, this week's podcast features an interview with one of my business partners Dante Andrade who knows more about the DFW market than anyone else I know. Make sure to tune in and see for yourself why I am so bullish on Dallas for this decade!

A few weeks ago I had my CPA, Tom Wheelwright, on the show to discuss what's going to happen with taxes in the next year or two under the new administration. Of course, the news was generally bad for high-income earners. Taxes will invariably go up. The idea is that the rich can afford it and they ought to pay their "fair share". It drives me crazy when I hear people say that—after all, what's fair? Is paying more than half of your income to the government fair? If you live in California you are already doing that. Anyway, let me get off that rant before it takes me into a sea of digression. Let's focus instead on who is going to be hit the hardest. Is it really the rich who are going to get hit the hardest with the tax hikes? I guess that depends on how you define rich. The truth is that the true rich are not going to see their tax liability change by very much. Apart from professional athletes, the true rich are not W2 wage earners. It is the high paid W2 wage earners who will be hit the hardest with new tax laws. Business owners and investors, those on the right side of Kiyosaki's cash flow quadrant will likely, net-net, come out even. For all the tax hikes we will see, there will be just as many opportunities for tax mitigation through investments into the things that the government wants to promote. The tax code is, after all, just a series of incentives for investors to take advantage of. That's why I suspect that for most truly rich people, tax law changes will not make a material change in terms of effective tax rates. If it seems unfair—well, it kind of is. You see, the government sees business owners and investors as vehicles for driving the economy. They produce the goods and services and fund economic growth through investments. Conversely, W2 wage earners are treated as fat cats that do little to contribute to GDP growth. Hard-working professionals may disagree with this assessment but that's the way the tax law is written and it is what future tax laws will be based on. So, what can you do about it? Well, as Tom Wheelwright says, "If you want to change your tax, you have to change your facts." From the perspective of decreasing your tax liability, that means shifting more of your resources over to the right side of Robert Kiyosaki's Cash Flow Quadrant—the world of business ownership and investing. If you are in our Accredited Investor Club, then you already know about the power of depreciation that comes along with investing in real estate. For most, shifting increasing amounts of financial resources into the investor quadrant is the smartest thing to do. However, speaking from personal experience, if you are able to get involved with the business owning quadrant, you can really open up a whole new world of possibilities such as higher levels of passive income and the ability to take deductions that simply are not available to you in any other way. The challenge is that business ownership is not that easy. In the vast majority of cases, business ownership is not passive. However, the financial rewards of business ownership can be dramatic and worth your time. The challenge again is that not everyone is cut out for business ownership and you need to think very seriously about it before you take the plunge. Then you need to figure out how you are going to do it. I'm probably a little different than most in that I feel most comfortable starting businesses from scratch. I have done it multiple times. While there certainly is a good chance of failing, the expenses incurred are often far less than other options. The other way to get into business is through acquisition. We have discussed franchising on previous shows and it certainly has its associated advantages and disadvantages. Another option is simply to acquire a free-standing small business. Admittedly this is not something with which I am terribly comfortable. Furthermore, this is not an area that I can point to someone as a trusted advisor. I am as clueless as anyone else in this world. So, when Carl Allen's team reached out to me to get him on the show I was happy to do it. Carl's business revolves around business acquisition. This week's Wealth Formula Podcast features a conversation I had with him to learn the basics. So, if you are interested in significantly changing your facts and taking the plunge into entrepreneurship by acquiring a business, make sure to tune in to this week's show!

Nassim Taleb, author of the Black Swan, extrapolates his theories on unpredictable events by suggesting that perhaps the ideal way to allocate your capital is by focusing on the extremes. He says that perhaps the ideal portfolio is one where there is extreme safety on the one hand—US Treasuries for example—and extreme risk and upside on the other. The idea is that you put the money you absolutely need away in a place that is as close to impenetrable as it gets. The other portion of your portfolio would go only to extremely risky but also potentially extremely profitable bets. In doing so, he postulates that you might end up with the ideal portfolio. I'm not sure I agree completely with Taleb on this. As we have seen for decades in real estate, when done right, we can pretty consistently achieve double-digit annualized returns. Treasuries would leave your yield below inflation which guarantees you lose money. However, I am increasingly interested in the notion that those who can afford it ought to consider upping the riskier part of their portfolio. We have typically referred to that risker part as an asymmetric risk portfolio. This might include your digital currencies, investments in start-ups and other types of investments where your upside is very high and your downside is pretty much unlimited as well. My opinion on this has been that these kinds of investments should be limited to 5-10 percent of one's portfolio. But it occurs to me that this allocation percentage is somewhat arbitrary. That is to say, if you make more money, does it potentially make sense to increase the amount you allocate to asymmetric risk? If you make $500K per year you might not want to put $100K into high risk high reward stuff. But what if you make $5 million per year? Would you be crazy to allocate $1 million to asymmetric risk of various kinds? Not necessarily. I'm not advocating this by any means. I would say that a lot depends on what your goals in life are. Personally, I know that I can use real estate to grow my money at a pretty good annualized clip—I figure conservatively around 18-20 percent all in for my investments. Over time, that's a pretty nice pile of money. But it probably isn't going to make me a billionaire. If I want to add more zeros to my net worth, I have to take more risks. As Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Bruce Arians says, "No risk it, no biscuit". If you want to change your life's trajectory and add more zeros to that net worth, you have to make sure you are giving yourself the chance to do it. Increased risk, however, does not mean that you are any less thoughtful of your allocations. Private investing always starts with the same principle regardless if it is real estate or venture capital—an evaluation of the people involved. At the end of the day, it is the people more than the asset that makes you money. Obviously this is the case even more when it comes to start-up businesses. On this week's Wealth Formula Podcast, I am featuring a company that I have introduced to you before in webinars. The company is Pixelmatic, which is by no means a start-up. However, the game they are creating is brand spanking new and has an impressive team behind it. Tune in to this week's podcast to learn all about the gaming world and how you, if you are an accredited investor, can get involved with a compelling asymmetric risk opportunity!

It's been nearly 5 weeks since my Covid diagnosis. The good news is that my brain seems to be back. The bad news is, I still feel about 40 years older than I am. That said, at least the trajectory is in the right direction. And, as many well-meaning people have reminded me as of late, I'm not exactly a spring chicken anymore. Thanks again for all those who sent me well wishes throughout this time. It has been great to have so many people actually caring about my well-being! With my neurons finally firing normally again I thought I would take the opportunity to finish up the questions that we had remaining from Q4 and do an "Ask Buck" episode. Keep those questions coming as it's always great to interact with you in this way. Listen to this week's episode HERE.

Political difference aside, I for one was relieved to see some order restored to the government last week. Whatever policy differences I have with Joe Biden, I believe him to be a man who cares dearly about his country and a man of integrity. As a person who loves this country first above any party, I wish him well and I hope that he can guide us through a difficult part of our history—one defined by death and destruction of a pandemic, the ensuing financial hardships inflicted on our people and hyperpolarization and partisanship not seen since the civil war. It is my sincere hope that President Biden can help us to find a new national discourse where we can disagree with one another without being hateful. Perhaps it's unrealistic to think that we can put the genie back in the bottle. After all, we live in a world without any agreed upon facts. We live in a world of soundbites and gotcha moments. But we are capable of more, aren't we? I know you are. Our community is made up of a lot of different people with different views on the world. However, I get the sense that there is goodness in all of you. The kindness that you show me and each other when we are meeting is special. The outpouring you had for me when I got sick was genuine. You are good people. As such, I want you to join me over the next several years to do your part in helping to bring the rhetoric down. Let's be thoughtful people and show respect not only to those with whom we agree, but those with whom we disagree. Above all, we need to remember that we are all fortunate to be Americans and that underlying all of our differences, we all want what's good for our country regardless of what that might look like through the eyes of any one individual. Now, with that said, let's get into what is probably going to be the most financially impactful change of the government on your pocketbook: taxes. There is no one I trust more on these matters than my own CPA, Tom Wheelwright, Rich Dad Advisor to Robert Kiyosaki and author of Tax Free Wealth. This week's episode is exactly what you need to know about tax law changes right now. Miss this episode at your own risk!

I'm still recovering from Covid so please excuse any typos and oddball things I might say. I am actually on steroids that do make people a bit different psychologically. As an update on my progress, I am about 10 days out from diagnosis. Overall I am relatively stable but have been dealing with something that many Covid patients call the cytokine storm period. At a high level, this means that the virus ramped my immune system up big time, so my battle is now less about the virus and more about fighting off my own immune system from damaging my body. That's why I'm on the steroids that suppress the immune system at this point. I'm hopeful that by next week's show, this will be over. In the meantime I want to, again, thank the hundreds of you who have reached out to wish me well. I am very touched. I especially want to thank some of my physician colleagues who have literally consulted on my care from thousands of miles away. Guys like Patrick Troy in Hartford and his colleagues. He's been on the phone with me every day, looking at my labs, CT scans, etc. I live in a small town with not a lot of big gun pulmonologists and ICU docs like Patrick, who gives this community greater perks than just the financial stuff. This morning I sent Patrick my labs and he said they were starting to look "boring"—which is good. He added that he knows that I like boring! He's right. I do feel a sense of responsibility to give you this public service announcement and hopefully it is meaningful to you. Avoid this virus like the plague (which itself is a bacteria and easier to treat). Because it sucks and it's scary. I can't tell you how many frightening stories I've heard in messages from you guys lately about otherwise healthy guys our age who succumbed to the disease. So...do what you can. This is not a political issue, it's common sense. Wear a mask and get vaccinated when you can. I guarantee you whatever side effects you get are better than having this disease. Just some more thoughts here broadly on this virus: It's really mind-boggling to me that a virus that started in a wild animal meat market from Wuhan China probably from bats created this havoc in my body. Kind of gross to think of it that way actually. I do hope that at some point the world stands up to the Chinese government to more aggressively regulate these places. After all it's not the first killer virus to come from these places and it won't be the last. But China owes it to the world to do its best to regulate its wild animal trade and be transparent with the rest of the world. The problem is that they are a world economic power and you can't exactly sanction them to death like Russia or Iran. But you can shame them and the Chinese do care about their reputation on the world stage. One last thing on Covid-19. An article in the Los Angeles Times today reports that 1 in 3 of L.A. County residents are estimated to have had Covid-19. That's three of the ten million people in that population. The good news is that it should make it easier to herd immunity with the vaccine if you are already starting from a 30 percent previously infected population. So, that's my daily Covid commentary and we will leave it there. I do want to make sure that I continue to provide you the kind of financial information that you have come to expect from this show. So, today we are going to jump into a topic that you can sink your teeth into. We are going to talk about the different options that you have when you have capital gains. The truth is there is no one size fits all but there are a lot more options than people realize. We are going to talk to Brett Swarts today about those options from A-Z. After that conversation, make sure to keep listening as I will end the show with some additional commentary on bitcoin and other asymmetric risk strategies.

For those of you in our accredited investor club, you might have noticed an abrupt cancellation of our real estate webinar last Tuesday conveyed by a cryptic message from my assistant, Madalyn. Well, here's what happened. Sunday, I went on a hike with my daughter. She is 11 years old and has the lungs of a marathon runner. I do my best to keep up with her. We do this hike regularly and wanted to set a new record time for ourselves. So with Taylor Swift music blasting for motivation we set off and ended up destroying our record by several minutes! Then we went home and met up with my other two daughters who are 8 and 5. Feeling like we wanted to end Christmas vacation together with a bang, we all jumped into the swimming pool which, where I live, you can do comfortably in January if you crank the pool up to 90 degrees. We played in the pool for an hour—basically I just throw them around in the pool which they love. After, that we had dinner and called it a night. Around three or four in the morning, I began having terrible chills and body aches. They rapidly got worse and worse. My temperature at 5AM Monday morning was 101.5 F—officially a fever. It felt like the flu but, given this whole Covid-19 thing, I had a bad feeling that it was not my old friend influenza who I had defeated a few times in life already. So, I got myself tested at about 8am at one of those drive-in places. While I waited in the parking lot for the results I could tell it was getting harder and harder for me to breathe. 30 minutes later, I had a positive Covid-19 test and I could literally feel myself getting sicker by the minute. I am a life-long asthmatic so I knew I needed to be proactive to give myself the best chance against this thing so I went straight to the hospital. As I walked a couple of blocks from the parking garage to the emergency room, I could feel the strength leaving my body. Honestly, it was getting scary. The waiting room for the emergency department was outside and everyone else there was pretty clearly a covid patient—all hacking away into their masks—pretty awful. Anyway, an hour or so later I got inside the emergency department. By that time my temperature had gone up and my energy levels had dipped to zero. I felt like I had been run over by the proverbial mack truck. And my breathing was getting more labored. In these situations I must say that it is very helpful to be a physician. I was made aware by my primary care physician that the local hospital was giving a very select group of patients a somewhat experimental drug called bamlanivimab—let's just call it BAM. Even though I did not meet the age and weight criteria, I was able to argue that my underlying asthma should be a reason to have it. Honestly, they didn't really fight me on it. But being a doctor, I was lucky enough to know that the drug existed and to ask for it. So, like many of the septuagenarian politicians on TV who miraculously recovered in no time, I too was given the goods. A couple of hours with an IV in my arm and I was sent home. I was in rough shape and had to get a ride back—left my car at the hospital. All I remember at that point was being unable to move and having a temperature of just under 105 degrees. Now remember, the day before all of this happened, I felt no symptoms at all. It is incredible how fast this thing took me down. It's a beast. That night I sweat more than I had since my days as a high school hockey player in Minnesota. I slept for 15 hours. And then I woke up—alive again. I felt sick, sure, but normal sick. And I truly believe that my miraculous turn around was because of the BAM. So as I record this podcast, I'm now on day 5 of my Covid-19 journey. Technically I'm not out of the woods but I feel pretty darn good for feeling like I was possessed by the devil himself only a few days earlier. And for the last 2 days at least, my mind has been reasonably functional. I've watched a lot of TV and thought about a lot of things that are going on in the world right now. So, rather than try to push out the usual podcast, I figured I'd just share some of those ideas with you—stuff like Covid-19, the current state of American politics, tax implications of government changes and, of course, cryptocurrency. Listen HERE.

When I just finished surgical residency, I took a job with a cosmetic surgery company for a few months before realizing that I was not employee material. It was a hodgepodge group of surgeons there. Some of us were younger guys who recently finished training and were looking for experience. There were also a couple of older guys who had failed in private practice and had become "journeymen" doing work at multiple practices to make ends meet. I had just finished reading Robert Kiyosaki's Cashflow Quadrant and was finally making some money of my own, following several years of minimum wage indentured servitude as a surgical resident. So, I was receptive to financial advice. I remember one time asking a sixty something year old surgeon what he would have done different if he could all do it over again. Now this guy had really not managed his finances well and was still having to crank it out just to get by. That said, what he did wrong was equally valuable to me compared to what others might have done right. When I asked him, he didn't flinch—"I would have bought more permanent life insurance," he said. "In fact, that's all I should have done." Admittedly I was a little confused by his answer. You see, I didn't even know what permanent life insurance was and it never occurred to me that buying life insurance could be an investment. As it turns out, this poor guy made a lot of bad investments throughout his life culminating with the 2008 stock market crash that wiped him and his plans to retire out in a flash. I asked him that question in 2009 and the only thing he had left was a permanent life insurance policy with cash value that had grown EVERY YEAR for 35 years. As this guy was giving me his perspective, another younger guy was listening in and, when the coast was clear, advised me not to listen to a word the older guy had said. "Don't listen to him," he said. "Buy term, and invest the rest." Now this guy was just a year ahead of me but he sure seemed confident in what he said so I listened to him. My wife was pregnant with our first daughter at the time so I asked around and found a Northwestern Mutual agent that all the doctors seemed to use (the blind leading the blind) and bought some term insurance. I did look at the option of permanent life insurance but, frankly, it was a ripoff! The idea of life insurance as an investment didn't come back to me until about five years later. By this time, I was making quite a bit of money with a couple of businesses cranking at the same time. During this period, I was in a CEO group with another guy who was an advisor to ultra-high net worth individuals. He and I got to be pretty good friends and I trusted him. He was the first one to explain to me why so many affluent people bought permanent life insurance products. As it turned out, the older surgeon who was broke and the younger know-it-all that gave me their contradicting advice were both right. Permanent life insurance was, indeed, a powerful and reliable investment and that's why so many ultra high net worth individuals use it. However, the guy who told me to stay away from permanent insurance was also right because the way most policies are structured, they are a rip-off. It was an example of a pattern I began to recognize—there are the products and investments that most people see and then are the ones that only the wealthy know about or qualify for. Once I realized that, I bought my first over-funded whole life insurance policy. But unlike when I bought term insurance, I bought this policy as an investment and as a strategy to augment the rest of my investments. The type of policy I bought was so different than what everyone was talking about with permanent life insurance that I decided it needed a new name to escape the baggage around traditional unfavorable policies. So, I decided to call it Wealth Formula Banking. Wealth Formula Banking is a wealth creation account more than anything else. It is an account that grows tax free at a guaranteed compounding rate and has done so since the civil war through the great depression, multiple bank failures and recessions. It is also a wealth magnification machine. While your money grows at a compounding rate, you can borrow money from the insurance company at a simple rate effectively allowing you to grow your money in two places a the same time! Any cash flowing investment can be enhanced by simply leveraging cash value and using the arbitrage of simple vs compounding interest to your financial advantage. It's like double dipping your investment capital! When I finally got a policy all I could think of was "Why didn't someone tell me about this five years ago?" Now, going back to that friend years before that exposed me to the virtues of permanent life insurance, he wasn't talking about this structure that I call Wealth Formula Banking. He was talking about a different kind of investment strategy. The kind of policy he was recommending to me grew with an index to t

We are finishing the year off with one final episode of "Ask Buck". This episode has a wide variety of questions with issues ranging from cryptocurrency to child-rearing. Make sure to listen! P.S. Thank God 2020 is coming to an end!

Lots more questions to answer on this Christmas week episode of "Ask Buck"! We talk about real estate markets, equity vs debt in your home and lots more. In the holiday spirit, I even asked a couple of our Wealth Formula Network members to join! Lot's of fun as usual. Enjoy the episode!

It's time for another round of "Ask Buck". This week's episode includes questions on Wealth Formula Banking, cryptocurrency, gold and real estate markets. Listen HERE!