#29 : Take Control of Your Financial Future
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Most of us are told that to save for retirement, we have to put our money into a 401K or other investment account and trust our financial advisor and the market to make the returns we want. It’s no wonder that many people believe that they don’t have enough knowledge to be a good steward of their own money. But today’s guests are turning that advice on its head and helping regular people learn how to take control of their financial future.
Russ Morgan and Joey Mure are the co-founders of Wealth Without Wall Street, where they help create strategies for generating passive income without relying on Wall Street. They teach people to stop trading time for money and help them achieve financial freedom by following their 5 Pillars of Wealth Without Wall Street: cashflow, life insurance, business ownership, real estate, and lending.
In this episode, Russ, Joey and I talk about how and why they founded Wealth Without Wall Street, their favorite strategies for passive income generation, and what myths about financial freedom they find themselves busting on a regular basis. We also talk about why people need to take back control of their money and make investing decisions that benefit them and their future, rather than relying on banks and the market.
In this episode, we’re discussing…
Why volatility in the stock market made Russ and Joey want to teach people about more reliable, controllable investment vehicles.
Their philosophy at Wealth Without Wall Street and how they teach people to build their own version of financial freedom.
Some of the most common myths they have to bust about investing and taxes, including the idea that you’ll be in a lower tax bracket when you retire.
How banks market themselves to seem like better stewards of money than the average person (and why this isn’t necessarily true).
The important role community plays in your financial success and motivation to find new ways to create the life you want.
Russ & Joey’s Top Tips:
Cashflow is king – creating a source of passive income that cashflows regularly is a key part of financial freedom. There are many strategies for doing this, so find the one that helps you achieve your personal goals and put it the work on the front end to set it up.
Wall Street is a great marketer – but nobody can be a better steward of your money than you. If you educate yourself, you’ll find that banks get you to take all the risk when you invest with them. You can make investments that are lower risk and higher return!
Surround yourself with like-minded people – having a community is a huge part of achieving financial freedom. Spending time with other people on this journey will help you learn more about what’s possible for you, will help you connect with the experts you need, and will give you the motivation and encouragement you might be lacking right now.
Resources:
Check out my episode on Russ & Joey’s podcast: How to Become a W2 Entrepreneur
Unsure where to start investing your money? Check out our free quiz for guidance and ideas about what to do with your money that’s smarter and can help you generate extra income now.
Like what you’re hearing on The Richer Geek? Have questions you want me to cover? Connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know – I’d love to hear from you!
+ Read the transcript
What if you could be doing something smarter with your money that creates income right now? If you're an IT professional who is wanting to get ahead financially and enjoy greater freedom of choice. And if you wonder who else in tech is creating ways to make their money work for them? You want actionable ideas with honest pros and cons and no fluff. Welcome to The Richer Geek Podcast for helping IT professionals find creative ways to build wealth and financial freedom. I'm your host, Nicole Stohler and in this podcast, you'll hear from others who are already doing these things and learn how you can too.
Hey everyone, welcome back to The Richer Geek Podcast. Before we get into today's episode, if we're not connected on LinkedIn head over there connect with me. My first name has an H in it so it's Nichole N I C H O L E Stohler, S T O H L E R. And that is a good place where if you want to send me an instant message Something you want to hear on the podcast or even a question, you can do that you can also email me and that's listed on the website. But sometimes people like just instant message capability, which I am pretty active on LinkedIn. And that is a good place to go. Recently, I was a guest on a podcast called wealth without Wall Street. What I like about this podcast and also the philosophy of the show's co host, is that we believe in the same things about taking control of your financial future. Now, as we talked about here, on the richer geek, I believe that everyone who's in a W two job should own or invest in a business. Now that business could be real estate. And it could be even if you just have one single family home that you are renting out, it could be a franchise could be something larger. It could be e commerce, we talk about these things, because I want to show examples of there's a lot of ways to do this. It doesn't always have to be real estate like I'm in and I want to share those stories and examples. And also provide resources to you. But essentially to get ahead financially, I do believe that you have to own or invest in a business. Today's guest, Russ Morgan and Joey Mure, from Wealth Without Wall Street, believe in those same things. Now, Russ was previously a financial planner and Joey was in the mortgage industry. And they're building a community that helps their members make better decisions regarding their financial future. in their community. They have coaching access to legal and tax experts, and then also networking with like minded individuals who are exploring multiple ways to create passive income. Russ and Joey, welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks for having us, Nichole. We appreciate it.
Yeah, glad to be on.
Let's dive in and have you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to create Wealth Without Wall Street?
Well, I'm probably the first one to kick it off. My background is in mortgage. I was a mortgage lender for 11 years, grew to be a branch manager and was leading 25 loan officers and closing about 20 loans a month when I got this kind of crazy idea that maybe I could have more impact if I started teaching people the things that I had learned from this guy for the previous four years before that, so I was Russell's client before I got crazy and joined him in this whole endeavor. Yeah, I mean, so basically all his success is sure because of me.
Now, thankfully -
You know that old saying that -
He's the humblest person I know.
Yeah, you're you're smart as the five people that you spend a lot of time with. And Joe is one of those people I've been around kind of helping me for a long time. And so I came from an investment background actually is funny that the name of our company now is kind of the anti the control Wall Street where when I got into the industry in 2004, that's all I did. Was Security business and, you know, had all those different designations and licenses, the CFP. But you know, everybody has these dates that that happened throughout their life and I had a very specific date that was pretty important. It was September 29 2008. You look that up, that was the the first time the Dow dropped 800 points. Now that's still a norm in our life. But that was a very shocking point to me something that I didn't know that could happen and didn't know why it was going to happen again, and what would keep it from reoccurring and and that was something that I did like to be out of control. So that kind of set me on this mission. And it's been fun for last 10 years finding better ways to help our clients build wealth outside of Wall Street.
And what are those better ways tell us a little bit about what that really means?
Well, for us, we've kind of narrowed it down over time to where we kind of refer to as our five pillars and the first one is, you know, the basic decision lyst you know is cash flow. Everybody knows that cash is king but really is cash flow is king is that flow of money? When money quits flow and everything stops, right and I remember 2008 that was where they really got scared is when they thought the credit market was were going to dry up and that's kind of way it is in our personal finances too is that when cash flow stops, everything gets really scary. So for us cash flow is number one, a tool that we use a lot, which is used by a lot of corporations and large big banks is something called dividend paying and life insurance we use a concept called infinite banking so life insurance is a pillar of ours. The third one is business ownership. We're huge fans of those people who understand what they do and invest in themselves whether it's a job that they work for corporation or if it's a business that they own. The fourth one is real estate. We love real estate, obviously been around forever. And our fifth pillar is lending and basically just to kind of undergird the first pillar under cash flow, I think that term gets thrown around quite frequently. But to kind of the way we identify that is there are certain things that we are unnecessarily allowing to flow away from us. Okay. So for instance, taxes we have within our community, we work with a group that is a tax strategy firm. That doesn't mean an accounting firm, where they're reporting what you did last year, they're actually looking at the tax code, and finding ways that you can strategically legally use that tax code to your benefit. So if you were paying 100,000 towards taxes, now, maybe that you'd be paying 50,000 Well, that's $50,000 that I unnecessarily would have been spending towards the IRS that now I can put into savings or into some sort of investment vehicle. So when we talk about cash flow, we're talking about taxes and those strategies and also how How we pay down debt. So I think there's a lot of misconceptions around debt, how to pay it off, that all debt is dumb or that there's certain things that we, we always pay off and so on. And so we really break those down and help people to see maybe more strategic ways to pay down that debt. So just to clarify, that was a couple of things that we we specifically focused under the cashflow pillar.
There's so much great information in those five pillars that you talked about. One thing I wanted to point out, I love that you talked about tax strategy, because people I think, especially you know, that are working in tech are making higher income, they are looking for ways to reduce their taxes, but they think that it's a CPA issue, right. It's going to a different CPA. In fact, we've we've had a lot of people ask my husband and myself about who is our CPA who handles our taxes. And the reality is we have also hired a separate tax strategy from firm, to your point. It's not on your CPA to necessarily bring up these ideas because they probably they have their hands full, just getting your taxes ready, right, especially with the the changes that happened this past year. When you talk about all those five different pillars, some of the things that we've covered on this show are self directed IRAs and solo 401k. Is are those part of strategies that you put together as well?
Well, those are areas that some of our clients use, there's not an area that we focus on. And we tend to look at those instruments that were kind of created more under the Wall Street mindset, so and not necessarily Wall Street instruments. So you can obviously invest in lots of different things, businesses and real estate and stuff outside of through the use of self directed IRAs or solo and fall in case we tend to shy away from those and one of our thought processes is around taxes. So obviously, taxes is the The one variable and investing that can be, you know, either a big win for you or big loss for you. And obviously, there's lots of different ways to do it. And we're not tax professionals who will give tax advice on here. But when we think of ways to help people, we try to say, hey, if you've got yourself into a position where you've accumulated a decent amount of assets within the 401k industry or the IRA, investment vehicles, then then hey, let's let's look at ways that you can use those maybe in those last three pillars that we talked about, whether it's business, real estate, or lending, and there's definitely some avenues. We also look at, hey, maybe there's some ways potentially to move out of those vehicles before you get into a tax burden. So you probably are familiar with this since you're already kind of higher and it's been a time with tax strategist but we we have until 2026 before the current tax law sunset, and we know that they're going to lease go back to work. They were in 2017, which were the higher brackets. And with all the different information that exists out there with where we are with unfunded liabilities of our government, not to mention our growing debt as a country, every indication is that our tax rates are going to continue to increase. So for us, we we look at this next, you know, seven year window is an opportune time for us if we're in those plans to potentially start moving out of them, invest in the same sort of things, but maybe go ahead and take the tax, and pay it now and avoid having to potentially pay a double tax on that same dollar, you know, 10, 20, 30 years from now.
That makes sense. Now, when you talk about those five different pillars, these are areas where do you do an audit of what a person is doing or how does it actually work that you apply those pillars?
So we're actually in the process of building an actual tool to help People kind of self, you know, self determine where they may have some gaps, and some, some missed opportunities, if you will. But right now we actually have advisors that meet with clients that will actually walk them through and look for Okay, so what is it that you really want to have happen? Like, what is the end goal? And I think, you know, Nicole, when we had you on our show, there's some people that have very, very different goals, like we can't just assume that someone wants to leave their job. Some people really love their job, but they want to find additional passive income sources that can help maybe mitigate some of the risk of being at their current role or whatever it might be. Some people want to leave it completely. And so those are going to take from strategies. Well, if we line up at that point, this is what you want to have happen. But this is what you're doing with money. A lot of times those things are in congruent, right, we find that those things aren't going to enhance what that person's goal is for themselves. And just by us kind of talking through that they really self discovering at that point. And we've been able to just kind of shine the light on what was always there. And then we can offer up, okay, if this is not going to help you get to your goal, well, here's an alternative. And it may be real estate, it may be lending or something like that that was under their nose. But they just didn't never really stop and do that analysis.
Well, and I would say to that, we get a very simple you can tell from our accident, accident accident. Our accents were from the south and we look at things very simply. And I don't know to call if you had any psychology classes in high school or college, but there was this old theory that was called Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Do you remember that at all? Absolutely. Yeah. So this basic approach of how money works, right, it's this, you know, at the very base level, they have this basic needs. food and water and then above that we have shelter above that we have the need for relationships than esteem and then ultimately reaching our highest purpose which he referred to as self actualization. Well we think of money in that same regard like this just basic tier that people should flow through and in order to like set themselves up the best way and at the bottom is where we do have that cash and cash flow and and creating systems creating strategies and and yes, we look at that we analyze all of those things, we figure out where people's money going, we help debunk a lot of the myths that exists out there. That's just bad information or half truths. And then we say okay, we get that right, then let's work in an area of control. That's kind of our second tier and control is investing in yourself, your your best asset, you know, what can you do in order to help yourself grow in the business that you're in or the business that you're growing? And then then we start looking at assets that we can start collateralized, like real estate or other business ownership and and that's where lending comes in a lot of times and then we said kind of that top tier the the tier then be honest, most of our clients don't get to with their what we would call their working money we say a lot of their hobby money the money that they're willing to kind of gamble with. That's the the money that's most speculative. That's where the stocks and bonds that's where the Bitcoin and, and the things that they don't have any influence or control over come in. And so we evaluate, we look for deficiencies, we try to figure out how much money do you have in those bottom areas, the areas that you have the greatest control, the greatest impact, and the lowest risk? Yeah, the lowest risk. And usually it's very opposite. Most of the time all the money's in a very speculative place that they can't control and don't influence at all. And so we do kind of help them shift their mindset of how do I create more control and less risk and there's where most of our philosophy starts and how are help to them moves forward.
Well, like another point to that, Nicole is that You know, we've been trained by big institutions, and by wall street, we're not, you know, conspiracy theorists, we just believe that wall street is a really good marketer, right? Like, they know how to make their product really, really attractive. And so they have enticed us with certain things, and they have made it sound like this is the best for us. And so, when we go through that hierarchy of Well, people are like, wait a minute, that makes a lot of sense. But it's the opposite of what I've always been told. Because really, the end goal of any large bank, or Wall Street is to hold onto your money As long as you will possibly let them and you take all the risk. I mean, that's a great business plan. If you think about it, like if you have the ability to do that, to convince others to allow you to have access to their money for as long as possible, and then take all the risk with it. That's a genius business plan. And we've really kind of bought that hook, line and sinker and that's what we kind of Cover to our podcasts and various YouTube channels and whatnot. So it was just to add credence to what he was just saying.
I love that you talked about we bought that hook line and sinker the mainstream is very much of you know put your money into the market or maybe in a if you want to reduce your risk a CD or something like that at the bank. What are some of that you said miss your help people understand our kind of debunk the myths, what are some of the ones that really drive you crazy?
Um, well, there's several I, we touched a little bit about the 401k and again, I when I speak to the 401k I typically go at it from the standpoint of putting the money in not necessarily already gotten there, right. So things that we've done in the past we can undo. There's some things I like about them, you know, say that you know, the some people would have never saved $1 had it not been taken out of their paycheck and that was a good thing about it. The automatic nature of But the the part of those accounts that I don't like is the deferred taxation. There's most of the people out there that we talked to on a regular basis that have no understanding of what the taxation is are going to be in the future and be honest, they don't even know they have to pay tax on the money when they get it out. And so as we start talking about, you know, what is deferred tax? It's two things. It's deferring the tax, but it's also deferring the tax calculation. And, you know, there's this old myth that says, Well, I'm going to be in a lower tax bracket when I get to retirement, right. I don't make as much money when I'm in retirement. So I'm going to be clearly in a in a lower bracket. Well, that's a myth. I mean, most of the people we had a really good mentor he passed away earlier this year at age 88. And he talked about how he paid three and four times amount of taxes this past year, as he did when he was 65 years old. And it goes because lots of reasons one, because if you've been really good steward of your money, you got assets that continuing, growing and producing more money. But also the things that you could write off early on in life have gone away, the kids are at a school, we don't get that deduction. If you follow the conventional advice, you paid off your your house, you don't have the mortgage deductions anymore. The business deductions, all the different stuff that helped us reduce our taxes are now gone. And now we have this increase, we've got an increase in rates, and we no longer have the deductions. So what we always look at, I say, you know, make sure you know that this is not a tax deferral in the sense that you never gonna have to pay it, you're gonna have to pay it at some point. And we always tend to say, Hey, is it better to pay tax on the seed or pay tax on the harvest and most people agree with those paying tax on the seed makes better sense well, and even if we practically put it in a different way, this is something that was kind of resonate with me having been in the mortgage business, but if you ever bought a house. And you sat down at the closing table and the closing agent handed you over the mortgage note document. And you're reading it just before you signed, right? You're going through you said, Hey, so and so agrees to buy the house at so and so address at this purchase price, and then there's a blank next to at this interest rate in the in the interest rate says TBD. What's the likelihood that you're going to sign that document? Right? You're not going to I mean, it's a 30 year note and you want to know, some pretty key aspects of the payment terms on that mortgage, that has to be determined. You've left a huge variable out of that case. Well, in actuality, that's what we're doing with deferred accounts. tax deferred accounts, is the IRS telling us, by the way, take the money, you just borrow that money quote, unquote, and we'll tell you how much we need later. In reality, we would never do that deal, but we're willingly doing it today because we've been told that it's to our benefit to defer taxes. So, anyways, that's just kind of a picture that resonated with me. Well, and it's you asked for several. So here's one I was listening to this book, it was actually referred to one of my clients by somebody that I respect a tax professional. And there was parts of it. I mean, just like everything that's is perfect. There's things we're going to say today that will be imperfect. And the way we say it, for sure will be imperfect. But that, you know, I was listening to this book, because I'm always trying to learn me, there's things we can learn at all in all areas. But one of the things I heard this individual saying very smart individually, actually a physician, and he was talking about debt and paying off debt. And he gave the phrase that if you when you pay off debt, you actually can have 100% return on your money. And he went through this example of paying off a mortgage for instance, and he said, you know, you pay off your mortgage, if you can pay it off within, you know, five, eight years. You're gonna gonna save this much in interest. And he kind of basically said, if you had a $200,000 home, but if you kept it for the full 30 years, you would pay like $250,000 and interest, and 50,000 was in the first five years. So you basically saved 200,000. So you kind of had this concept of paying off $200,000 a debt, you save $200,000 in interest, that's where it's hundred percent came from. But that's not that's not the truth, right? That's not 100% return on our money. And I get where he was going. He was trying to teach people not to overspend and, you know, getting out of debt. It's a good philosophy. But at the end of the day, it's we always have to look at the other side, what can we do with money, you know, if there's things that we can, we can do with money that can earn a higher rate of return with low risk than it cost us, for instance, to pay off our home mortgage, I'm not encouraging people to have high interest rate credit cards or you know, go out and buy boats and things like that. But I'm not a fan necessarily of you know, looking at On one hand, paying off my mortgage. And then on the other hand, I see people that are going out and doing, for instance, the same guy was actually a proponent of no load, or no fee, you know, mutual fund index funds, things like that. He's talking about the return possibility, and always see the conflict in those two, if I really believe that those things could earn six 810 15%, whatever the return is, why would I ever pay off my mortgage at four. So either they don't believe on one hand, they can earn six 810 or 15%. Or they don't understand that they're telling somebody to take a big chunk of their money and pay off something that is costing them for that they could have earned six, eight or 15%. So those two are probably the biggest things we see just the misconceptions of how I should save for my retirement one and then to how do I efficiently get rid of debt because debt is a bad thing and it's something that needs to be managed and needs to be dealt with, but also it can cost us a lot money doing it the wrong way.
And the last thing I would say is probably the biggest thing is that people don't believe that they can make better choices in investment than somebody that's a quote unquote, financial planner. Or I need to give up control my money because this person, or this organization, or this institution, is going to be smarter with money than I am. And that, to me is probably the saddest part is we've been trained to think that, but as you teach on your show, and as we've interviewed you, you took action, and you've educated yourself. And now look at the returns that you've been able to experience personally. Because you took that back, you didn't defer it to somebody else. You didn't abdicate that to somebody else. And quite frankly, when the when this stuff hits the fan in the 2008 and what we're probably on the precipice of now Nobody else is going to take responsibility for that loss except you. So I think the biggest thing that we run into is people not believing that they can affect their financial future better than somebody else.
That's such a great point. And it is exactly as you're mentioning, one of the reasons we accelerated our real estate investments, just the the variables, that unknown that you talked about. And also, I knew we could be doing better in real estate absolutely continues to outperform. If you buy right and you know what you're doing. So I do have to put that disclaimer in because you can't just go out and just buy anything. Yes.
Yeah, you have to surround yourself with people who are doing those things at a high level and learn and I mean, I know you mentioned reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, but it can't just stop with one book, right? It's got to, you've got to really invest in yourself and in the education that it takes to Do these things at a high level, you can't just walk blindly into it. So anyways, I'm not trying to say it's easy, but it's definitely better to take those steps than to just abdicate to somebody else. Well, one thing came to my mind as I sit in here, as you can tell, we're not lost for words and co I'm sorry. I don't know if most of your guests talk to us as we do. We love to talk. But I think about my wife, my wife said, Dennis, and there was a lot of schooling that she had to go through in order to get her degree. And this is one of those myths that exists out there. It's a statement that is constantly repeated. And that's if you want to get return, you have to take risk, right? Risk equals return. You've probably heard that before, right? Yes, yeah. There's this belief that if I want to get return, I have to take risk. And the way it's been kind of position is okay, you don't want to take risk. Then you stick it in a CD and look a CD gives you one and a half percent no return. And so that's been the kind of like, standard example of trying to show and prove out that theory. But that's not really the the end of the rule there. Because I always look at, you know, some of the most famous and successful investors out there pick Warren Buffett, for example, right? I mean, if we're looking at the market, somebody who's invested in the market, he's probably the best example someone could point to, and they would say, Man, he's been super successful. So I would say, Well, do you think Warren Buffett takes lots of risk? Most people would probably say no. And the reason why he doesn't take risk is because one he has very good management in place. Most of the companies he invest in mostly he buys controlling interest of the institute's his own management structures. He connects them to his other, you know, tons of companies that he owns, so they work together and sequence so they produce better returns through that synergy. He actually through his control reduces his risk. But as we all have seen, has had amazing success. high return, will always point to my wife as an example in this, I say, Well, you know, let's look at my wife. When she was preparing to become a dentist, there was some tests that she had to take in order to be able to get into dental school. Now the return for her the highest return she could get was actually passing the test and getting into the dental school. The risk, right if she wanted to take the highest amount of risk, it would be not studying. So what do you think my wife did you think she took the highest amount of risk and not studied so that she could get the highest return and get into dental school? Of course, she did the opposite, right? She reduced her risk by as great as she possibly could by studying as much as she possibly could. And then in turn, may did very well in our tests and got into a great dental school and ultimately did the same thing with her clinical in order Become a dentist. So it's the same thing is that controlled environment they are you that you can control is what actually reduces risk. And as we see, as entrepreneurs, we see it in real estate investors and other areas and where we take our experience, our talents, our understanding, and we apply it, we actually see higher rates of return under a lower risk. Now, it's not without risk, right? Because there's variables that we can't control. But if we can control as many of them as possible, we reduce our risk as much as possible. And we also increase our returns. So that's one of those, I always see to in the world of, you know, we have to take high risk in order to equal high return. And that's really a cop out for investment advisors to say, hey, if you lose money, you knew it because you were trying to get a higher rate of return.
Oh my gosh, I love those examples. I do and I'm thinking about I'm thinking about people that have, oh my gosh, have really had a tough time because they did leave it to advise Who were advising and and saying that you were taking that risk? So tell us a little bit because you mentioned just briefly, you talked about the tax strategy firm that's in your community. Tell us a little bit about the community itself and what that is.
So what the community is really born out of an idea that people want to be together, they want to be around like minded people who are trying to do this, the same process or the same path. And to be honest with you, it's a minority, right majority of people, the herd are going to continue down the same path and expect different results, and they're going to be disappointed, right? But if you're in that minority, you may be really excited about what you're doing and you go to your water cooler, and you just get way, I mean, whacked over the head like whack a mole, that you're doing this thing all wrong, like you're an idiot for not investing your 401k or You're an idiot for not for going to do in real estate when you could be, you know, deferring the tax over here, whatever it might be. And so the community is really born out of the idea that we need to be in community. We need to be around like minded people. And then what Russ and I realizes, we're probably the experts in the whole using life insurance as an asset base for all this to take place. But we aren't the experts in let's say, business consultant, and we're not the experts in tax strategies, and we're not the experts in real estate. So why not bring together all those experts in one place and give people access to them, so they don't have to spend the time going all over the internet all over the world trying to find out where these things are. We've really kind of done the work and brought it all into one place so that people can just really save time and get focused well, and we also we, you know, we haven't daily conversations with people about finance and have been for last 15 years of a common just statement to us, as we asked, like, you know, what are these challenges? What would you say is the biggest challenge keeping you from building passive income? That's that's the buzzword, right? Everybody wants something passive. Now, I don't believe there's a true passive income. There's, there's cash flow investing, there's things that may come more passive over time, but it takes a lot of work on the front end to get anything started. But one of the comments that we would hear is, yeah, I just, you know, I don't know anyone else is doing it, or, you know, I've got this kind of self sabotaging mentality that I start, you know, doing something and then I fall down and I start making mistakes again, or, you know, I don't know anybody else that, you know, is doing this or I don't know, where I get access to these things that, you know, these people are doing in order to create passive income. And we started here and just these common challenges from people and I was like, Well, what is the best way to help them? How do we, you know, a podcast A lot of times outside of the guest is just really a one way conversation. How can we interact? How can we surround people who have the same goals with people who are doing it, and also people who want to be doing it? And they're all at different stages? Yeah, some people are just getting started. And they're just in that kind of fact finding gathering information stage where they, they're just not satisfied with what they've always done. And they're like, okay, there's gotta be something else. And we've all kind of been there. So there's people that enter at that stage. And then there's people that enter at a stage further down the road that they can help that person, say, Hey, this is what worked for me. This is what I was working on. And this is where I'm at now. And so and then you get some of our podcast guests involved. As you've already heard about, Nicole, we're excited about you to be a guest in our community to do a live q&a. Well now, the people that are in our community can say man, I have specific access Some of the top minds in real estate are the top minds in business consulting and or authors and people that I really want to understand where they're, they're thinking. And so now they have access to them in that community. It's really unprecedented in this in our industry, there's not a whole lot of collaboration. There's a lot of brilliant people. But a lot of people work on islands, they don't tend to work together, there's not a whole lot of synergy. And you see that behind the scenes, sometimes you get people to get together, they have mastermind groups amongst themselves, but not necessarily helping, you know, average Joe, the person who is you know, very successful in life but doesn't, you know, surrounds himself with other people similar to them, and maybe their goals are not the same. And so they don't, they don't hear these things. And it's very, it's so funny, you know, like, people will say to us, you know, heard you interview in that guest about real estate and how she got started in real estate and now Success. They're having this amazing but you know what? I just don't have access to that stuff. I don't ever hear these things. And always bring up the point that, you know, our brains filter out so much information on a daily basis we don't even can't even imagine all the information that it's having a process and I don't know if you've ever heard this before but there's a thing in our brains is called the particular activating system you ever heard this Nicole? Know? So our brain is this you know, this working instrument constantly processing information, amazing power. But in order to avoid it just constantly being tired, it takes information and weeds it out, filters it out that says, hey, this is an important so it lets certain pieces of information through things that we say is important to us. It lets it through. So for instance, I'm going to ask you a question, what kind of car do you drive right now?
I drive a Prius,.
A Prius, okay. It was just the first one that you have or had - Did you have one before that first one? Okay. All right when you got your first Prius, and you're driving around Tell me for the next month and a half. How many Prius's Did you see on the road?
Well, I don't know exactly how many but I saw a lot. I saw a lot.
Yeah, you saw a ton right? I mean even would work even if you got the most unique color. I had people tell me all the time, whatever kind of car it was, and I like you not get the most unique one never thought I was ever going to see another one. And then it just started seeing them everywhere. Well, it that's that particular activating system in our brain. That's the part where now that one thing very small, the thing that we drive a daily is important to us. So our brain says, Oh, this is important to you. So Oh, there's one. There's one right there. There's one part right there. Oh, there's one on the interstate. And our brain starts doing that when I was a kid for some reason. I got fascinated. Looking at a clock looking at 1111 every time the clock said 1111 it would just amaze me. So now I can be anywhere in a room and if the clock says 1111 My brain points that out to me now, I don't notice when it's 1203 142, you know, five, five or six, whatever, I don't see it because my brain is saying that's not important to me. But your Prius is important to you. And so I always tell people is that are the beauty of being in a community like this, or any community, whether it's a real estate investment, a group or whatever it is, is that when you start going, you start reading you start watching listening to podcasts like yours. You're telling your brain This is important. So those deals that you say that man, I hear other people talking about it, but I don't ever see them. I promise you they're sitting right under you need your nose that just like all those Prius's that been circling around you forever, that you might have not noticed until you got yours. But that's the same thing with deals and when you start telling your brain This is important. Now it quits filtering that information now and it's amazing was we start having people come back to us. You know, we had a guy that was You know, really interested in real estate investing has been very successful. he'd gotten 13 homes when he met us. But he started listening to more podcasts on and start attending more events and involved with the community and less than a year. He's up to 64 homes. I mean, this is an amazing numbers and these are just individual properties that he's buying. Well, these deals that it took him forever to get started and to acquire his first 13 now he has just gone berserk because he isn't everywhere, everywhere.
Yeah.
So you know, those things are what a community are about is not only encouragement, but also is telling your brain is is important. And it's the success you have just because of it is pretty cool.
Well, and let me say this to like, the people in our community are pretty wide range, like we have somebody that was a postal worker that got really fired up about this idea of getting out of the rat race in his case. He was literally driving hours upon hours. He was the middle Man, he was driving on the opposite seat that you're used to. And he was putting mail in people's boxes. And he said, Man, I just started listening to podcast after podcast after podcast, like basically doing driver University, you know. And now he even started his own podcast called wink and I quit my job. And he's done was able to leave his his work within about six months, employing some of these things. Now he's flipping land. I mean, he's doing all kinds of crazy things. But it's because he really dialed in, he focused down on it. So we have people from that end of the spectrum all the way up to I mean, multi millionaire entrepreneurs that are doing things at a much higher level, but the same thing is consistent. And that is investing in yourself, educating yourself and then putting things into place, and networking with other like minded people. So just to give you a broad range that we're dealing with,
I love to that it's a smaller community with the focus on these different pillars I was thinking about a lot of people will ask me about the funding, right, and the mortgage and different strategies around real estate investing, specific to how the financing works. And I'm not I'm not an expert in that by any means I know what I've done. But you know, I think there's a piece of me that always says, Well, maybe there was a better way to do that, or maybe a different strategy. And I like that, that's, that's one of your pillars is understanding that and the word have the right techniques at the time for that property or looking to purchase or whatever the case may be, and there's not really a place to go and get that information. I'm going to put a little plug in here. I love the name you created for this. I also had mentioned to you the real estate that I often recommend people check out bigger pockets on my podcast, but one of the things that I also caution people is don't just go there, go there with a plan because if you just you're going to be Two days on that website, and you're not going to have really come up with anything, because there's just so much information. So tell us a little bit about what you guys have created because I love that too.
Yeah. So that we have kind of micro groups within our community. And what I'm is focused on real estate. And we've got to interact a little bit with the bigger pockets people as some different events in the past. And so we we took a little bit of a spin off of what they came up with. And our our micro group for real estate is called biggest pockets.
And what's better than bigger, I mean?
Yeah, I guess yeah, biggest for sure. Right. I mean, that's supported, but it is other real estate investors that are in there that are learning from each other. You mentioned a second ago, you know, not knowing the funding part. That's a big question. And we actually interviewed a guy on our podcast that did how many mortgages last year I think was...
700.
Yeah, that's 700 investment property loans. Last year. So if you want to talk to somebody who knows how to do investment, real estate lending, right, you talk to somebody who did 700 loans, a lot of people would just go to their traditional mortgage broker like Joe used to be. And of course, they may know a few things, but there's a lot more details when it comes to investment loans. And so we we had him on our podcast, and he's in our community and somebody that you can, you know, like, reach out to and ask questions of, and, and, you know, these people, what we found are amazing at just adding value and helping others and this is a beautiful thing that, you know, in this world, you know, it's it's tough to find good information. It's tough to be in a place where you feel like you can give and you don't want to be taken advantage of. But that's kind of where we found is that, you know, thankfully, we've been blessed in the fact that the people who been on our podcasts have all been willing to come into our community, and to add value to do Q and A's and and for those of Who are just learning and trying to figure out better ways to do things to have experts to ask these questions, whether it's just personal experience or his professional experience is pretty cool.
Where do people go to check out the community?
So what we did is we actually created a unique page for your listeners, they can go to richergeek.wealthwithout wallstreet.com. And they can get access to a free video series that we actually have, as well as learn more about the community. And if they even want to set up a call with us, they can do that there as well. So lots of options, but go at your own pace and engage whatever is easiest for you.
I love that. I cannot wait to go in myself and take a look around and get some tax advice and a few other things. And thank you guys for coming on. It's been a really great understanding more about your five pillars and the focus that you bring the mist that you're Trying to debunk and the resources that you bring to your clients and the community that you're creating.
Ya know, we're always thankful for, for you and just teaching people and it's so fun that there's people in the tech world that are trying to find a way to invest differently or better. And just thank you for just your having this podcast, as we know as podcast hosts ourself is not easy. It is it is a lot of work to put this on. So we applaud you for for helping those around you. You do an amazing job.
Well, thank you so much.
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ABOUT RUSS MORGAN AND JOEY MURE
Russ Morgan started his career in the financial industry. With 4 years of planning under his belt, Russ was stunned in September of 2008 to see the DOW Jones plummet 800 points. He had no idea that the market could react in such a volatile manner and knew this was something he could never have control over. Russ believes that it's time you stop following conventional planning methods and start thinking for yourself. He enlightens business owners and investors with the knowledge they need to make sound financial decisions.
Joey Mure started his career in the mortgage business in 2003. He grew to become a branch manager with one of the Nation's top mortgage lenders leading 25 loan officers. Despite earning an impressive income he still had significant questions about how to save for the future without having to borrow from banks. In 2010 Joey met Russ, who shared the Infinite Banking Concept and everything changed. IBC allowed Joey to get completely out of debt besides paying off his mortgage, he started saving four times the amount he had previously been saving, and now had a clear plan of how to save for all our life's expenses without giving up retirement savings. Joey decided to join Russ and co-founded a company called Wealth Without Wall Street. They teach people to stop trading time for money to achieve financial freedom by following the 5 Pillars of Wealth Without Wall Street.