Month: March 2022

March 4, 2022

Fed Printing Money

Today, we’re going to have just a quick little lesson on economics. And this is my big thing right now. And it’s been my big thing for a while actually. And that’s inflation caused by the Fed printing money. Now the Fed doesn’t really print money. But let’s go back and talk about what the Fed is. The Fed is the Federal Reserve Bank, right? It’s actually not a government organization, it’s a privately held bank, it’s supposed to be specifically separated from the government. And it’s supposed to, it was started in 1913. And it was supposed to basically be the, like the diaphragm of the economy, right? When you need to breathe in, you need to expand the money supply, and the Fed was there to provide that. And then when you need to contract the money supply, because things were growing too quickly, the Fed was there to pull things back. But what has ended up happening through a very slow evolving process. It’s become an enabler, to fiat currency. And fiat currency just means money that’s backed by nothing, right? For a long time, money in the United States was backed by gold and silver. In fact, I’m a coin collector. And if you pull out some of my old bills, on the top, it would say silver certificate, or some of the old ones would take gold certificate. And if you read it, it said, you were able to take that certificate into the bank and get an equivalent amount of silver or gold, right? In 1971, we went off of the gold standard, meaning we didn’t have the gold to back up the value of the dollar. And that thing that started that launched this incredible period of time, where things just went out of control, and they weren’t backed by anything other than the full faith and credit of the US government. Well, we’re able to leverage that, at least up until right now. But I think that’s in jeopardy, because we were the reserve currency of the world. Now, very few currencies, that are the reserve currencies of the world last more than 100 years, like the last one was the British pound. And we took them over. And before that, I think it was the French franc, or, you know, before that it was the, you know, the Netherlands, Netherlands had their money. And before, you know, whatever, it just goes like that, where after 100 years, people realize, you know, that, that people get corrupt in government, and they start to waste money when they start to get corrupt. And it’s happening here. And so let me go back to what that is all about. So, in 71, we went off the gold standard, and we just went to this fed, that was supposed to be independent. But really, they’re now more than ever, certainly tied to the Treasury. They’re tied to the government, they work hand in hand, and they basically painted themselves in the corner. Now, what does that mean? Well, the Fed has been expanding the balance sheet at a rapid rate, certainly since 2008, when we had the financial crisis. And so, as they’ve been expanding that balance sheet, just in the last couple years here, since the 2020, decade began, has been, I don’t want to say exponential, but it’s pretty darn close to exponential, right, we’re going almost parabolic with the amount of money that we’re supplying. So, the way you have to look at that is, okay, Mark. So, what, it’s always worked in the past, it’ll always work in the future. But there has never been a currency that’s lasted very long. In the past, like, we’re not using the stuff that the Romans used to use, that was a great currency. And then there was a decline of the Roman Empire, right? We don’t use the same currency that the Greeks used to use. 2000 3000 years ago, there was a decline of the Greek Empire, right. And so, currency and economies go hand in hand, empires to the United States have been the preeminent Empire for 200. And something years now, certainly in the last 100 years, where we won a couple of wars, and we help rebuild continents and countries. But that’s coming to an end. And it’s coming to the end, and you’re seeing it on a graph, right? It’s not that, it’s an opinion, it’s the graph, like when things go parabolic. I’m a stock trader, when they go parabolic. That means there’s a period of time where you can make a lot of money, and then all of sudden things crash, and you can lose a lot of money. Now, I don’t know when the party ends could end in 20 years, 20 months or 20 days. I don’t know, all I can tell you is that never before in our history have we printed this much money now. It’s not actually a printing it used to be they used to, you know, crank up these printing press and they would just pump out all these $100 bills. And by the way, why aren’t there $500 bills now, why aren’t $1,000 bills, but that’s a subject for a different podcast. But they print these bills. Well, that’s what they were doing. Now what they do it’s so easy. All they do is they go in and add zeros to the banks to the federal bank reserve system, and they add some zeros to the end. And it’s pretty easy, right? They click a mouse, and boom, there’s a bunch, you know, there’s billions or trillions of dollars pumped into the economy. And what happens when you have extra money sitting in your pocket? Well, you either want to save it or you want to spend it, you could invest it. And that’s what a lot of people are doing from their savings. But most people spend it. And so, they go and buy stuff that they wouldn’t have bought when they didn’t have the money. And if they’re willing to buy something for $100, well, since they have a little extra money, what’s 110 And that creates inflation. And that’s all really coming from two things. It’s coming from government irresponsibility, they spend more than they bring in in taxes, right? And they spend it in a very inefficient fashion. So, if the government allocated that money to private enterprises, most private enterprises, right, not all of them, obviously, but private enterprises do a much better job than the government in allocating and spending capital. So, what happens is the government takes in all this money, but they’re not business people. They’re the government. Right? So, they hire a bunch of people to do the same job that just a few people might do in a private industry, right? Why isn’t the government Amazon? Well, Amazon’s much more efficient than the government, right? The government can’t even deliver your mail without losing billions. And, you know, Bill, I think it’s probably trillions now. But anyway, we’ll go with billions of dollars every year, it’s delivering mail. And they get to have all this money and subsidy come in from Amazon where you know, they were, they were going to go to the house anyway. Now they get the extra money for stopping off and dropping an Amazon package, and they still can’t figure out a way to make money. So, if you put the postal services in the hands of a private company, they’ll probably figure out a way to do something better than the government is doing. But yet the government is slow and clunky. And we there are certain things that we believe that we should have the government do and the post cert Postal Service is one of those things. But at the end of the day, when we have the government doing anything, certainly in charge of the money, they behave irresponsibly. And that happens hand in hand with two entities right now. It’s the government’s the politicians, and the politicians need money from the Treasury and the Treasury is run by Janet Yellen. And Janet Yellen used to be the secretary of the Fed, right? She used to be the head honcho at the Fed, the Fed was supposed to be independent. And then they took Janet Yellen, they put her in the government. So, are they independent anymore? I don’t think so. Right. I think first of all, I don’t think she knows what she’s doing. And second of all, I think that the Fed and the government are in cahoots. Now, because they need each other, the government needs to spend more money to buy more votes to let people sit at home or do whatever it is they do, are put in these government programs give out free things, and they’re not free, that means that rest of us are paying for them. And we’re paying for them either in higher taxes, or a very insidious tax called inflation. Inflation is a tax on mostly the poor, because a lot of people can, you know, can afford to spend an extra $10 on a TV, right, but that extra $10 for somebody who doesn’t have a lot of money that goes for groceries. And so now when that $10 goes for groceries that they did, like, they don’t have extra money after that. And so, you’re really taxing the poor. But the poor don’t realize it, right? We just vote for these people, because they go, they’re going to give us all this free stuff. But they don’t realize that they’re paying for that in taxes because of inflationary pressures. So, the government spends all this money because they’re buying votes, and they’re doing things in a very inefficient way. And so, they need a lot of money. And they’re like, hey, where are we going to get this money? And they turn to the Treasurer, and they go, can you give us some more money? The Treasury returns to the Fed and they go, can you guys give us some more money? And the Fed goes, well, sure, we’ll give you more money. So, the Fed has kept inflation rates, sorry, official inflation rates, and official Fed Funds rates, the amount of money that they charge their overnight lending, lending banks, members banks, right, at a very artificially low price. And that’s created that’s helped to create more and more inflation. So that chart that we put on the screen is indicative, the higher that value goes, the more I believe, right, that more that we’re in jeopardy as taking that dollar off the dollar reserve. We’ve been in the dollar reserve currency for 9495 years now. We’re putting that in jeopardy and we’re making that less likely to stand right. And if that happens, I think it could happen quickly because we’re all connected, right? Right now, right? I mean, 100 years ago or 50 years ago. When we didn’t have the information that we have now, now we have tons of information. We know almost at the moment how much more we’re paying for things. We know how much the government; we think we know how much the government is printing in money. And so, these things are happening faster and faster and faster, the brain can’t comprehend it, which also means that things could collapse faster and faster when they do. I don’t know when they will, if they will, I believe they will. And I believe if you study the past economies over the last 1000 2000 years, you see the same graph, right? You see irresponsible government, you see money printing, fiat money, money that goes off the you know, the standard as a reserve currency, and then you see a collapse of economies and oftentimes, followed by collapse of civilizations or certainly collapses of empires. So that’s what’s going on. And that’s the quick little lesson on the money supply. And it’s a quick little lesson on the government and the Fed and how printing money causes inflation. Inflation hurts you and it’s going to hurt our economy. At some point. When the party ends and the music stops. You better have a chair to sit in.

March 4, 2022

Stocks, Options and Crypto

Today we’re just going to have a brief podcast and talk about stocks, a little bit of real estate, some crypto and some options, right? And these are some asset categories that you should know about, if you want to make them part of your portfolio. So, let’s start with stocks. Now, I’m going to keep this fairly simple, we can get really complicated. I’ve been doing stocks for over four decades. But listen, a stock is basically a share of ownership in a company. So, I don’t know exactly after a company has an initial public offering how that really affects the company, that this secondary trading in the secondary markets, you know, works for the company, I think it’s based on the future of if they want to raise more money or buy back their shares, I can’t really understand I think it’s actually a gigantic Ponzi scheme. That’s been held up for a long time. But you know what, we could debate that. But that’s not the purpose of this. I think the point is, when a company does well, and you own shares of it, if the company does well, they’re supposed to in the past, they used to pay you dividends on that company, right? So they would make money, and they would pay you a portion of those profits. Well, today, most growth companies certainly are not dividend companies, they don’t pay any dividend, they pour the money back into their research and development. Like look at Amazon, for example. Amazon for the for most of the last 20 years, hasn’t made any money. So what they did, they didn’t pay their investors any dividends. But the stock went up like crazy, like 1000s of percent, right. And so when they when it went up, the investors benefited, but they never were going to get dividends out of it, they made money on capital appreciation of the shares. Well, Amazon didn’t make any money on that capital appreciation of the shares unless they had some shares in their treasury, Amazon made money by, you know, going out selling products eventually and making a profit, but it took them like 20 years to get to profitability. And investors anticipated that. And so as they anticipated that they drove the stock up higher. But why would you buy a stock if they’re not going to pay you any part of the profits? Well, it’s because there are other people that are buying stock, because they’re not going to pay you any part of the profits. So at some point, it becomes a greater fool theory, there’s somebody that’s going to be willing to pay you more for the stock that you then you bought it, and then the stock price goes up. But still, you’re not making any money on the stock only if it goes up. But there’s a lot of growth, stock stocks that go up, that make money or they don’t make money. And there’s a lot of growth companies that go down, that make money to or don’t make money. So who knows. The bottom line is a stock trades on anticipation of future earnings, I’ll say that, again, a stock trades on anticipation of future earnings. So if a company is a growth company, in other words, Amazon, for example, if you’re like what Jeff Bezos was doing, he was taking all this money. And he was reinvesting it into the infrastructure of Amazon, buying trucks, buying distribution centres, building stuff around the world, making a bigger company, making it more efficient, putting different places so they could have more efficient distribution, making better deals on the products that that were being sold, making vendors more wealthy through the process of creating a platform where they could become more successful capitalist. And so through all of that, while he didn’t make money, as a company, in fact, they lost year over year over a year, they plow that money back in to building this company. And then when they stopped building the company, all the money went into profits, right. And so that’s what ended up happening now. They’re still not sharing that profit with you, they’re still like cutting you a dividend check. So is the company going to continue to go higher? Well, I don’t know most people are still buying stuff on Amazon. So probably, it’s going to continue to go higher, I don’t think it’s going to grow as quickly, I don’t think it’s going to have profit growth as much once it plateaus. And that’s generally what happens with growth stocks. So part of your portfolio should be in growth stocks, and I always look at it like growth stocks are a way to stay ahead of the inflationary curve. And there’s a huge amount of inflation going on right now, you know, this, when you go to the grocery store, you know how much more you’re paying per pound of chicken or per pound of beef, or for eggs or for dairy, even for bread. I remember when I was in college, and this is dating me, but you know, college was a long time ago, but I was paying 59 cents a can for a can of tuna. And now a can of tuna as a you know, like a buck and a half or something like that. That’s almost triple not quite triple. So if you’re if you look at that over a period of 30 years, and you say well, that’s basically you know, 50% of, you know, a decade. That’s a pretty high inflation, right? And even if you look at it today. Inflation because the government is printing so much more money now than they were ever printing in the past. Even percentage wise, they’re printing so much more. You can see inflation just permeating itself throughout the economy. And part of that is because it permeates through the transportation system. If gas prices are up 50%, and they’re up at least 50%, at least where I live here in Florida, they’re up at least 50%. So if gas prices are up, 50%, you know, the truck prices are going to be up. And since wages are going up for truckers because we have a supply side supply chain shortage there, they need to pay truckers more and more money truckers are making like 95,000 a year now they can command that. And people are willing to pay it because we’re still looking for products. And we’re we have a supply chain issue. So we’re like, give us some more toilet paper, give us some more soap, you know, give us some more big screen TVs, I don’t know. And we blame it on the ships that are sitting offshore. And that’s certainly a part of it. But we need to move those goods around our country. So we pay the transportation companies to do that. And when that happens, that permeates through the price of your products, right. So wage prices are permeating through the price of your products transportation, and then this free money that’s floating around, when there’s extra money floating around, people are willing to pay more for things like Hey, I got an extra 10 bucks, I’m willing to buy that Now then, maybe last year, I wasn’t because I was scrimping. I didn’t have that extra 10 bucks. Now, so I’m getting off on that. But stocks are a way to hedge inflation. Let’s talk about real estate. Real estate is also an asset, a stock though you can take your mouse and you can click on it you can be in or you can be out of stock. Very liquid has some real benefits for liquidity. Now that can cut both ways, because it can go down very quickly when there’s a lot of panic selling. So you can you know, things can move. But I remember back in the year, you know, 2006 2007 I was given some seminars, and some talks and people would come up to me at the breaks or after the talk. And they would say you know I’m invested in real estate, not stocks, because real estate never goes down in price. Never saying that. And I remember thinking real estate never. Now I hate the word never right never goes down in price. Well, we know what happened in 2007. And 2008, real estate prices just got shellacked. And a lot of people lost their homes, because they had that belief that real estate never goes down. So they were highly leveraged, and they weren’t able to get out of it. So real estate is an excellent asset class. In fact, the government wants you to own a lot of real estate, so they give you tons of incentives that give you the ability to depreciate things and take them off your taxes. Because, you know, if you have a roof that eventually needs to be replaced, t that replacement only happens once every, what, 25 years or something 20-25 years. So they’re gonna allow you to take the value off each year of what you would have paid, if you divide it by 25 years, you get to take that off the income on your taxes. So there’s some benefits to owning real estate, that’s just one of them, you get to deduct mortgage interest, things like that. So real estate is an excellent asset class for stability. Now, it’s not a very good liquid asset class, like if you want to get out of your house, and you have a market that’s not like it is right now where it’s really hot, you want to get out of your house tomorrow, you’re going to have to sell it at a pretty big discount, right? So it’s not as liquid as clicking a mouse. It’s quite illiquid actually. And it usually takes time for you to actually sell real estate, you can’t do it within a few seconds like you can’t with a stock. So those are two asset classes that generally track inflation, the benefit that real estate has is that people need a place to live or people need a place to have their office or you need a place to make your products or have a distribution center. So real estate has a really cool role in the fact that there’s major utility built into it. In the case of a stock, there isn’t a lot of utility built into it for you. And so it you know, it doesn’t have that same advantage of real estate, so real estate’s a great asset class to have in your portfolio. Now, let’s talk about options. And I’m not going to go really deep into options, I’m just going to tell you that an option is basically the right, but not the obligation to do something. So when you buy an option, you buy the right, but not the obligation to do something. And usually there’s an expiration time on an option. And so before that option expires, you have the right but not the obligation to perform a certain act to buy something to sell something. And if you don’t take advantage of that the day that it expires, the moment it expires, it’s worth zero, right? And so that is it’s basically a written contract of what you can do you have the right but not the obligation. So for example, if I have the right to buy your house for $500,000, I buy an option on that I have the right to buy it, that doesn’t mean I have to buy it. What if I don’t think your house is worth 500,000? By the end of the option? What if it’s only worth 450,000? Well, I don’t have to buy the $500,000 house from you because I could go and buy it on the regular market for 450,000. So that’s how an option works. Now an options a highly leveraged vehicle usually right when you’re a buyer of an option, you’re not going to pay for it or 50,000 for that option, because it has that expiration time, right, it’s worthless after it expires, you’d rather have had the asset. So you’ll pay for the right to do something. And usually to do that, you’ll get some gigantic leverage. So maybe it only costs you $4,500, to have the option to buy that house for 450,000, or 500,000, or whatever the number is. And so it’s a fraction, it’s a fraction because of the inherent depreciation of the value because as it moves towards its expiration date becomes worth less than last month. And so there’s that value in options, options play an incredible role in a portfolio, I believe, though, you have to be on the sell side of options. In other words, you have to be not the person that has the right, but the obligation, but the person that gives the right or the obligation to someone else. And then in exchange for giving that right for to do that for someone else, you collect a premium. So if I give you the option to buy my house at $500,000, you’re gonna pay me for something to for that, for that ability to do that, I get to pocket the money. And whether you exercise it or not, it’s an agreement that we made, but I get to keep that consideration, I get to pocket that money. So options can play a really, really great role in your portfolio. And if you want to learn more about options, we got lots of stuff about it. But there’s lots of stuff on the internet too. So options are really cool vehicle. And the last one I’ll talk about is what I call a tech asset. And a tech asset is like think about the Internet. In 1995. Yeah, there were a couple of websites, there were some emails going around, people didn’t really know how it was going to work out. But it worked out like our whole lives are right around the internet. And it’s growing even more exponentially, today around the world. And so if you think about that was a tech asset, Imagine owning some really cool tech assets at 1995. And having them today, right, you know, 20 years later, 2030 years, almost 30 years later. Imagine how cool would that be? If you just put them away, went to sleep and own them that much later, they’d be worth, you know, way, way, way, way, way, way more? Well, I think tech assets are always a part of an investment strategy. And I believe you should have some tech assets. Now the tech assets for me today are in things that are cutting edge, cryptocurrency, crypto assets. So if you can get involved in the cryptocurrency market, and I’m talking about getting involved in a responsible way, by the way, this is not financial advice. This is just an opinion, do your own research, but get involved in a responsible way. What is the most utilitarian cryptocurrency out there? To me it’s Bitcoin it’s the most tried and true, it’s not been hacked. It’s, it’s been tested, it’s really clunky, right? It’s like the, it’s like the big, you know, IBM Vax that they used to have the big computers that you couldn’t really mess with them. They didn’t go down much, but they weren’t really fast. That’s what Bitcoin is. But bitcoins like the most adopted cryptocurrency out there, so it’s probably not going to be unseated. I was looking at Bitcoin, like the Coca Cola of cryptocurrencies, right, you’re not going to unseat Coca Cola, even if you wanted to have a great soft drink. Coca Cola has got that market covered, you might be able to take a shot at Pepsi, or maybe you know, diet right or whatever the next one is our C, but you’re not going to be able to unseat Coca Cola. But there are other really great utilities for other cryptocurrencies. Ethereum has a smart contract buyer. So a lot of has smart contract layer. Cardano has a really great story. Helium has a cool story, like there’s a lot of utility out there. Going back to the internet. When I sat through that, boom, I watched all these beautiful stories that had, you know, like, they weren’t making any money at all, but they had all these really cool ideas, some made it some didn’t, some didn’t at the time. And now they’ve made it like, you know, Amazon was not a big deal bringing, you know, groceries to your door. That was called Web van, I think at the time, and everybody goes, Wow, that’s a really great idea. And then it crashed. But now, getting groceries delivered to your house is not a big deal. Amazon does it. And other companies do it as well. And you can have people shopping for you at the grocery stores and things like that. So sometimes, you know, if you’re really ahead of the game, you can do well, but sometimes you can, you know, catch that falling knife or, or maybe it goes all the way to the ground and you never catch it. So tech assets are should be a part of your portfolio, gold and silver and some of those other things that are hard assets should also be a part of your portfolio as well. Alright, so I kind of gave you a smattering today of some of the assets that you should learn about to be part of your portfolio of stocks, options, real estate, tech assets, and even a little bit of gold and silver. Right gold and silver has been around for 1000s and 1000s of years. It’s been a medium of exchange for us, traditionally, and I you know, while I don’t make gold and silver, my cornerstone of my investment strategy, I think we should have some of it in there. And then the other part that you’re looking for is you know, some digital gold and I kind of look at Bitcoin to be digital gold. So, Things to think about things to look into and, and you know, have as part of your investing strategy. Invest in portfolio. Don’t just be a real estate person. Don’t just be a stock person. Don’t invest just an options. Don’t just invest in gold and be a gold bug. There’s lots of ways to make money and if you allocate and diversify among those asset classes, it can create a much more sound financial plan. Hope that helps. Have a great day. See you next time.

 

March 4, 2022

Welcome to the Wealth Architect Podcast

So, I’m excited to be here. Not sure exactly where we’re going to go with all this stuff. But I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. So if you’d like to have fun, that’s like, what I always want to do is no matter what I’m doing, I want to create, but I want to have fun. And so I want you to hold me to that standard. How about that. So this is the first episode of the wealth architect podcast, listen, I start everything from what they don’t teach us in school, you know, we go to school for all these years, and we learn about Copernicus, and we learn about the Egyptians or Cleopatra, or, you know, the ancient Greeks, or you know, and all that stuff is great. We learned about Romeo and Juliet, and the Pythagorean Theorem, but you know, we don’t learn about how to do our taxes, how to buy a car, negotiate, how to buy real estate, how to invest in the stock market, how to create our financial future, how to make it so that we’re not slaves to, you know, working all our lives until we’re 65, when we’re too old, to really do anything meaningful with our retirement years, right. Like, we have to keep ourselves in incredible shape, just to be able to enjoy that small window of time, but we worked 4050 years, all of our lives to get to that point. So I kind of come from everything from that particular place, right? I want to help people figure out that there are other ways. So there’s shortcuts, right? There are ways to get there a lot easier. And so I want to kind of focus on what they don’t teach us in school. I mean, I think it’s all flipped, like, you go to school, and you’re on this stuff. And they teach you all these things, and you come out and you you’re supposed to be well rounded. But like I use money every day, I don’t use the Pythagorean Theorem every day, I don’t use the, you know, the a squared plus b squared equals c squared. But I can tell you, I can think about taxes. And I can think about negotiation, I think about human relations and communication. And those are things they don’t teach us in school. So we had graduated from school, when we had 12 years, almost 30,000 hours to learn things right between 24 and 30,000 hours, where we sat and listened to did homework. And they missed that opportunity to teach us the things that we needed. Why? Because they want to put us into this little box and make us go to work from nine to five and put a screw in a hole for eight hours. That’s how our how our education system was created. And I want to change that, right? I think we you know, we go to school, and we learn all this stuff. And then when we finish school, then we have to learn the real stuff. Like that’s all optional. Like the optional stuff should be taught first. And then if we want to learn about the Korean War, we should go and learn about the Korean War, or what happened with Madison and Hamilton, and all those guys. I mean, I think it’s cool to know about your country for sure. Don’t get me wrong. And I think there’s a place for all that, but come on, like Teach us how to file taxes, right? Teach us about the economy, teach us about things that we don’t have to get a higher degree to figure out what we’re doing right though, gets me it really gets me going. And then a lot of people go to school and they spent a couple $100,000 In education, they owe money for the next 30 years to pay off that education. But education doesn’t teach them the main thing, how to make money. Like that’s the whole point you go to school. Otherwise, you could just not go to school, if you’re going to be living in your parents basement after spending 200,000 on a policy degree. And don’t get me wrong. If you got a policy degree, that’s great. And especially if you can make it work in your field. Good, but I don’t think you’re the majority. I mean, if you’re going to go to school, and you’re going to become a veterinarian, or a doctor or lawyer or an account or something that actually translates to making some money when you graduate. That’s awesome. But most people don’t have a plan. And if you’re one of those people that has one of these degrees, that I’m gonna poopoo from time to time. That’s great. And if you’ve made it work, that’s great. And College is great. I went to college, I loved it. But I could tell you I’ll quote my my university professor Mars, President Marshall Crider at the University of Florida who said 99% of the things you learn are outside the classroom and he was absolutely right. So here’s here’s a podcast that we’re going to teach you things that are outside of the classroom. So here’s we’re going to talk about money. We’re going to talk about passive income. We’re going to talk about the importance of cash flow. Yeah, we’re going to talk about the economy and the economic situation and issues that come up. We’re going to talk around system but systems around

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finances, we’re going to talk about stocks to like from time to time, I’m going to talk to you about some timely stocks like Tesla’s pretty timely right now, and I’ve invested in it, you know, I’ll probably going to show you some charts if you’re watching the video version of this podcast. And so we’re gonna, but really, we’re also going to focus on the success mindset that you need to have, you know, 90% of any success comes from the mindset you have going into that success. And whether that’s investing or in life, we want to focus on the mindset, we think that I think it’s really critical. So. So who are you listening to? My name is Mark Yegge. And maybe you don’t know me yet. But I look forward to getting to know you, either through these podcasts or, you know, maybe some interactions, or maybe you get involved with me, during some of my courses, or some of my seminars or whatever, somewhere down the road, that’d be really cool. But I’m a wealth architect, what the heck does that mean? Well, I help six and seven, figure investors structure things financially using offense and defense. Right. So a little bit about me, I’ve had my own Wall Street brokerage firm. For several years, I was a pioneer in electronic trading. So if your electronic trading right now, I was at the very beginning of that revolution, helping you create some of those systems at something called an electronic communications network and ACN, one of nine SEC approved trading firms to do what we did, it was a financial technology play was a lot of fun growing that thing from nothing to, you know, multi million dollars, and a lot of employees and a lot of associates and really doing lots of cool stuff on Wall Street. And I had to have all the licenses. So I’ve been through being a customer all the way through being an owning my own brokerage firm, and being a broker and a financial planner, and all that stuff. So I’ve traded over $14 billion worth of securities, notional value, through my hedge funds, my company’s personally, and now I help other people learn how to do that through my systems, my programs, my courses, my mastermind groups, my mentoring. And so that’s, that’s kind of where I come from, and all this financial stuff is that, you know, I think about it all the time. And I’m always immersed in it. So I feel like I’m on the cutting edge of what’s going on. And I don’t have all the answers. You know, what, you put two economists in a room, you can get eight answers, right? And I’m, I’m basically one of those, but I think I have a common sense approach to stuff. And I come from the Austrian School of Economics, where, you know, it’s a little bit different than the Keynesian school, or, or the modern monetary theory, which you’ll hear about. And I believe that that’s an important part. Because if you study economics, you can be prepared for it, right? You don’t have to have a degree in it. But you can be prepared for the economy and what’s coming, if you study and if not, you’re just kind of ignorant, you’re going along with what they tell you on TV and 90% of the time, that stuff is wrong. So listen back to the offense and defense. Offense is making money. It’s cash flow, it’s passive income. It’s the types of investments you’re in those kinds of things. Defense is about structuring things to be bulletproof. Right? When things don’t go your way, when the market goes the other way. How are you bulletproof? Are you are you got your tax stuff in order? Are your asset protection things in order? Are you understanding the economy? And by the way, I’ve been doing this investing game since I was about 12. When you know, I came home one day, or actually, every day, my dad was looking through the Wall Street Journal, tracking his stocks writing things down, and I finally got curious. And I was like, Dad, what is that? And he started to teach me about the stock market. And I invested, and I put in like 100 bucks, and it turned into 300 bucks. And then I put in $300. And it turned into $600. And pretty soon I bought a stock called us or Allegheny Airlines that became US Airways. And it went from 17 to 35. And I made a bunch of money that I learned how to short. So it was really fun. I bought my first car for my investments. And I was hooked ever since. So I’ve been investing ever since that period of time. And it’s it’s been a lot of fun. And I think I’ve got some nuances, because of the Wall Street background that I’ve got that I can kind of give you some secrets that Wall Street has. And maybe we can take advantage of some of those secrets. That’s what I like to do is kind of figure out the hacks the the cool ways that Wall Street’s doing things, but maybe they’re not sharing with us. And I think you should know about them. And I teach those people, I teach people those things all the time. So what is the wealth architect podcast? Like I said, welcome to the first episode. Hopefully, there’s gonna be many, many more, but we’re gonna be talking about the stock market. We’re going to be talking about crypto assets in the crypto market, because I think that’s a big thing that’s going on. We’re gonna be talking about real estate, I’ve got a background in real estate. I don’t love real estate, I’ll be honest with you. It’s a great way to make money. But for me, it’s, you know, it’s not my favorite thing, right? And maybe I’m just doing it wrong. But I’ve been doing it for a lot of years. And I don’t love real estate. But I think it’s important. I think it’s a plays a critical role. So from time to time, we’re going to have real estate people on here, in addition to stock market people in addition to crypto people. And in addition to the comments that I’m going to be making, based on the news of the day of the news of the week, we’re going to be talking about the economy a lot, right? We’re going to weave that in and my theories on it and maybe your theories on it and our guests there is about that

We’re gonna mostly also be talking about success mindset principles, personal growth, development, positive approaches to life language, some of those things that you may not hear about on other podcasts from other places. So I’m excited about that, it’s going to be really fun. And it’s going to create a lot of really cool dialogue. So I have this quad investing strategy, by the way, it’s based on trying to get you to cash flow and passive income. So you’re gonna hear me talking a lot about that. It’s basically hard assets, like real estate, soft assets, like stocks, and crypto, well, tech assets, or crypto, and then being in your own business. So we’ll talk a little bit about entrepreneurial things, leadership, management mindset, how you can create best practices with your people, your teams, and even in yourself getting organized, things like that. So we’re gonna cover a broad group of things. But really, it’s about, I don’t know, being successful and doing whatever you do, and making it so that you focus a little bit more on money that maybe you have in the past, I don’t believe that you need to focus your whole life on money. But I can tell you, if you don’t have it, it’s a lot better when you have it. And if you don’t have it, you need to figure out how to get it. And, you know, I travel a lot. And I go to Europe, and I go to Greece, specifically an awful lot. And it’s funny how my mindset shifts, my mindset shifts when I’m in Greece, because in Greece, they really don’t focus on money very much. It’s probably why they don’t have a lot of it a lot of people, right. But you know, they focus on laughter, family, good times, having fun, enjoying vacations, things like that. And I realized that when I’m there, I become a bit different. So in our Western society, and I don’t know where you’re listening to this podcast from or watching this, but in the West, in our Western society, we focus on money. And I think money’s great to focus on. But if you build your whole life around it, you’re I think you’re missing the point. I think the Greeks and the Europeans and a lot of other parts of the world they haven’t, right, the money is a means to get to that lifestyle. So we’re going to be talking about lifestyle, right? For me, I like to travel the world. So you’re going to see this podcast from different parts of the world. And maybe I’ll tell you about him while I’m there. But you’ll hear me talking about because I love to travel and meet new people and new cultures. And I always learned something about myself. And I learned something about these cultures. So that’s going to be fun for me, hopefully, I’ll take you along with me to, to some of these really cool places. And so, you know, when we talk about hard assets, we talk about a portfolio mix, there’s a mix of hard assets, soft assets, tech assets, and business assets that we’re going to be talking about. And so I like hard assets to be about 30%, soft assets to be about 40. Tech assets to be five to 10%. That’s your crypto and things like that. And then your business assets to be 20 to 25%. But you know, what, you may not have all those. And the main thing is I’m talking about cash flow. And I read years ago that we all need a cash cow, we need something that brings us in our cash, we need cash to live on cash to save, the Save becomes investments, the investments become passive income, and then we can start living on the passive income, we don’t have to work and exchange time for money. So I’m going to be talking about all these concepts in this podcast. But you notice there’s kind of a theme, it’s really all revolving toward a great lifestyle. So listen, I’m not going to kill you with more of this podcast. First episode, I just wanted to lay the land get you to kind of get to know me a little bit. And that’s basically it, I want to thank you for being here being part of the first podcast, I’m not exactly sure where this is gonna go. But we’ll figure it out together. And if you want to make some comments in here, and tell me Give me some comments on how I can improve it, I want to improve things in life. So that’d be kind of fun. Come back often, I My goal is to put this out at least weekly, and have some really cool interviews on here. And if not, I’ll just give you some spin on what I think is going on in the economy or with the stock. And by the way, I’m going to be making this at least the intention is to make this a video podcast also. And the reason I’m doing that I can make it audio so that you can listen to it at the gym and things like that. But by doing it as a video podcast, as well, I might be able to annotate things for you. So for example, if you know a stock is doing a certain thing, and I want to do an analysis of a chart, I love to do analysis of stocks, on charts, and a lot of people love the way I do it. So you can’t really describe that on an audio podcast. I’ll have the video podcast for those that want to watch YouTube while you’re on the treadmill. But if you’re listening to it on an audio podcast, what I’ll try to do is I’ll try to describe as best I can, what I’m showing on my screen so that if you’re not able to catch it on the screen, and you’re just listening to it, you can still basically picture as I describe it, so I’ll do my best to do that. Hopefully I’ll be able to, to show you that I’m but but primarily this is going to be of an audio driven podcast with some video support, but I’m going to be doing both of them. So anyway, that’s it. Thank you for being here.

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