Blog

November 29, 2022

Empowering Women Through Wealth with Penelope Jane Smith

We’re spicing it up with a little estrogen here today. I’m excited about it. You have no idea how much fun this lady is. Just in talking to her right before we got started, she’s full of this beautiful positive energy. She’s a premier financial freedom mentor for women entrepreneurs, and the go-to expert for some of the biggest names. She’s got her own cryptocurrency, this is so cool. We’re going to talk about that. She’s been with Mark Victor Hansen, I mean, on the stage, Mark Victor Hansen, T Harv. Eker, Alex Mandossian, Loral Langemeier, and Ali Brown, a lot of my favorite people in there. And through her signature programs like financial freedom 101, which resonates with me, because I love to teach people about financial freedom and cash flow. She’s helped 1000s of entrepreneurs from all over the world to create more ease peace and freedom around money. You need to listen to what she has to say.

 

** Download your free copy of The Financial Freedom Formula eBook, where you’ll discover exactly what it will take for you to become financially free, the two types of passive income, and how to get more of each! FinancialFreedomGift.com

 

Cash Flow Machine Mentorship – http://www.cashflowmachine.io
BECOME A CLIENT -https://go.destinycreation.com/application-page

November 23, 2022

Bitcoin Can Change The World with Guest Natalie Brunell 

Our Special Guest today is Natalie Brunell. She has quickly become a leading voice in the Bitcoin space. She continues to masterfully interview experts in the Bitcoin arena, coloring the landscape with macro-economics, investment and use-case facts for the impending Bitcoin future. I enjoyed turning the tables on Natalie by interviewing HER and she did not disappoint. From her deep opinions about the Fed to the implications of the acceptance of Nayib Bukele (El Salvador’s popular President), to what Bitcoin can do for humanity, Natalie was a wealth of knowledge about how Bitcoin can benefit us all. Enjoy this wonderful episode with Natalie Brunell.


To reach Natalie:
@nataliebrunell
https://talkingbitcoin.com/

To reach Mark:
@markyegge
Mark@wealtharchitectpodcast.com
www.wealtharchitectpodcast.com

______________________________________________________________________
Cash Flow Machine Mentorship – http://www.cashflowmachine.io
BECOME A CLIENT -https://go.destinycreation.com/application-page

November 17, 2022

FTX Bankrupt Don’t Trust Anyone

Hey everybody, no doubt you’ve heard about the FTX bankruptcy, the FTX insolvency. This guy named Sam Backman, fried, and this is all allegedly and it’s all in opinion, by the way. So don’t go running to the bank and buying Bitcoin or whatever from this is all an opinion. But allegedly, ran off with what’s reported now at $16 billion worth of people’s money. And so, you’ve got to be careful, right? This is a teachable moment as Michael Saylor would say; “we have the ability to learn from this”. So, let’s figure out what happened. We’re not going to know everything that happened, but I’m going to give you my best synopsis. My best synopsis is this:  

You’ve got this guy who’s a nerdy dude from MIT. And he created an exchange called FTX. And he basically shopped it around the jurisdictions, he tried Singapore, he couldn’t get it to stick there. He tried a bunch of the places and he ended up in the Bahamas, created this thing. It’s an exchange where you can put your money in and then you can buy cryptocurrencies. Seems pretty reasonable, right? It was offshore flag number one. But it was called ftx.us. So, it made it seem like maybe it was a US sanctions thing or whatever. 

What he did was he went out and raised money. How did he raise money? Well, he created a cryptocurrency of his own, he created several but FTT was the main one. I’m going to show you some data on just a second. FTT was the main one that he created, and who was the buyer, a hedge fund that he created called Alameda capital. Alameda capital happen to be run by a girlfriend, there’s always some cool part of the story. So, she basically said, okay, cool, let me buy some of this. Well, she bought it, it was recently a wash transaction, he spent $100 million over got $100 million back. And now on FTX, his balance sheet, it shows that they’ve got this cryptocurrency called FTT, that’s got some value, created a billion dollars out of thin air. And then Alameda basically had a billion dollars out of thin air because nobody was auditing them, and there wasn’t a regulator checking them. So, then he’s like, let’s do this again. And basically, he did it over and over and over again, and he got other investors to come in and go, “Wow, look at all the value you have on your balance sheet with this cryptocurrency.” And it looks like it’s trading, let’s give you some money. So, they either loaned him or invested in his projects, this guy apparently had 138 different projects, all intertwined into one or two or three entities that all went belly up over the last couple of weeks. Now, the unfortunate part is when all this stuff happened, he actually took people’s money. So, if you invested on the FTX, exchange, you gave him your money. And then if you bought Bitcoin, or Ethereum, or Cardano, or any other coins, you kept them on his exchange, well, when you keep something on somebody else’s exchange, it’s essentially their wallet that you’re keeping it on, right? It’s not your wallet, they just have a little line item that says it’s your money. But at the end of the day, it’s not really your money, it’s their money. Because it’s like saying, “Here you go hold my $1,000 in your wallet, I’ll see you next week.” Well, if they say, “See you later”, and they never see you next week, you never get your $1,000 back because it’s in somebody else’s wallet. So, there’s an adage on the street that says “not your keys, not your coins”. Keys means that specific spot that unlocks the private address that you have your coins on. And so, if you know those keys, then you control your coins. So, what most people do, who, you know, listen to that adage, what they do is they take their money off the exchange. They say, “Look, I don’t want to leave it in your wallet, put it over here on my wallet, and they get a little cold wallet, it’s like a little USB, and they put it on a USB that’s programmable, and then they unplug it from their computer. So, it’s not connected to the internet, you put it into a vault somewhere. And so that is not your keys, not your coins. Now, if it’s your keys, nobody can do anything. If you leave it on the exchange, what this guy allegedly did was he took these billions of dollars of people’s money, hedge funds money that were on the exchange, and he took it off the exchange and bought into these different projects. Well, as long nobody questioned what the value was of FTT and the other cryptocurrencies that he created and had on his balance sheet, then everything was fine. But unfortunately, somebody said, “Wait a minute, I don’t think that’s real. I’m going to sell all mine.” And when he went to sell it, there were no bidders. And so, when there when it went no bid, basically the bottom dropped out of it. It was illiquid. And then the whole house of cards collapses. And this guy took off right? Taking over a million customers with them. It’s between one and 5 million. They’re not sure yet. But like $16 billion worth of value. So, this guy who was on the cover of Fortune is the next Jesus Christ or the next, you know, Savior of cryptocurrency, and you know, people went like gaga over this guy. He essentially took everybody’s money, essentially, and maybe allegedly, and maybe we’ll find out that he didn’t, but It’s certainly seems like because now he’s trolling, he’s messing with people on Twitter.  You know, there were lots of methamphetamines being used and uppers and all kinds of stuff. And he basically became sociopathic. Now, I have no idea of any this is true. This is just the report that I’m giving you.  

But let’s take a look at this balance sheet that I have. And it’s a leaked balance sheet. And it’s, it’s put into a visual format, kind of like an infographic from a company called Visual capitalist. It’s a really good company. And I’m going to be quoting them here. So, I’ll give them all the credit for doing this. But let’s take a look at it. So, it’s here’s a picture of Sam Bankmen-Fried. And there’s the balance sheet and it says the they file for bankruptcy as the exchanges finance have unraveled amidst the bank run. So, when this happens at the end of every cryptocurrency at the end, ever fiat currency, people run on the bank because they don’t believe in the in the trust that’s holding that up in the background. And so they go, “Okay, let me get my money out.” And when everybody does that, then everything collapses, especially because he was using as what’s called the fractional reserve system. He basically said, “Well, yeah, you put in a billion dollars, but I’m going to loan 10 billion or borrow 10 billion against it,” what are the chances everybody’s going to come and ask for your billion dollars back? Well, it turned out to be pretty good, but that was only when the faith and trust was gone.  

Let’s start with the liability. So, you can look on the screen it says the liabilities are, $5 billion of liabilities in US dollars. Okay? A billion dollars’ worth of bitcoin 1.4 billion, 672 million worth of Ethereum. So, on those two major cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin being number one and Ethereum being number two in stature and status, they lost $2 billion, right, adding to the $5 billion, they borrowed to do some other stuff with so these are, these are liabilities, right? This is what they’re owed. This is customer money, Genesis, which is another exchange. And now as I, as I talk about this, they’re freezing. Some of the assets on Genesis is having problems because systemically, they apparently had some money on this balance sheet, which I don’t understand why you would do that as an exchange. But that’s people. And then some euros, right, they owed $115 million a year, as all told, there was a bunch of other stuff over here. In other projects, more than half of FTX is liquid assets were in Robin Hood stock, which is a millennial based exchange that allows you to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, as well. And so, their assets were in a lot Robin Hood, which is the largest, largest liquid asset on the balance sheet, that’s foreign 72 million. So, when you add those liquid assets, the money that can be readily converted to cash, there was 900 million, okay? Then there’s some other stuff like look at all these other things at the bottom USD, which is tether, it’s supposed to be called a stable coin, which basically means it’s pegged to the US dollar, well, that’s lost a little bit of value, it’s trading at 97% of the US dollar value. And so anyway, I’m not going to go into all of them. And then this block phi is another exchange. Now block phi is in trouble, right? Because they’re know you know, out 215 million and who knows what other exchanges they’ve given money to what are their hedge funds, like a lot of stuff is collapsing in June of 2022 FTX, bailed out block phi with a $250 million revolving credit facility. And the reports are suggesting that block fie user funds migrated to the FTX platform in return. So, there’s a lot of backhanding, and backroom deals going on, you know, that that are just odd. And it’s a shame because a lot of the faith that we all had in cryptocurrency is coming down. Now, maybe that’s good. And that usually happens in capitalism, the weak are taken out. Unfortunately, if you didn’t see it coming, and you were one of those customers that got sucked into it, you might have lost all your money. And that’s, that’s the real shame. That’s what happens here.  

You can look at the less liquid assets. These are different tokens. SRM is a token that he created called serum, which is basically $2.2 billion created out of thin air. This is Solana that’s almost a billion dollars in liquid assets, you know, other ventures that he took this borrowed money and customer money and invested in other things that allegedly, and you can look at all of this stuff. And like I said before, it was it was 138 different entities that were sucked into the vortex of this thing. He created this cryptocurrency called Trump lose. This basically means you can create something out of thin air, he created $7.4 million worth of Trump lose. And it was a basically a bet on whether Trump was going to win the 2020 election, right? He was basically betting win or lose the 2020 election, and then people would buy and sell this cryptocurrency, and he borrowed against that, too. So, you can see there’s a lot of funny business if you really look under the hood. And it’s hard to look under the hood, right? It’s hard to trust, by doing due diligence. I mean, imagine you have 200 bucks, right and you open an account on FTX and you go through all the stuff to verify your name and address and all that kind of stuff. You think you’re dealing with a record or entity and at the end of the day, you’re not going to be able to decide whether these assets are worth this or not or that you believe that they’re stated on the balance sheet. So unfortunately, they weren’t and, people got really hammered on FTX. So, it’s a real shame. That’s kind of a quick explanation of what happened. There’s a lot of other things going on behind the scenes, allegedly, he’s been brought back to the United States for questioning, maybe he’ll get charged here, maybe he won’t, maybe it’ll stay in the Bahamas, maybe he’ll be on the run.  

Because this guy stashed away billions of dollars of customers money in Bitcoin or in some exchanges, or it’s even in Switzerland. It’s not all just using cryptocurrency to hide your money, you can, but you can also just put your money in Swiss bank accounts, you can put your money in Panama, you can take your money and put it anywhere. When you’re a billionaire, you have a lot of things you can put my money in. In fact, I think he’s got a condo that he bought with probably customers money allegedly. And in the Bahamas, it’s he’s got it on the market for $40 million. So, a $40 million condo, this guy, even if he just sells that, he’s probably not going to have to miss many meals. It’s just an instructive moment for us all that we can’t trust people. We can’t trust the entities that we think we can trust. You know, we put our faith in the government over the last couple years. And I think now we’re starting to realize maybe that wasn’t the best thing to do. We put our faith in the Fed, and I think we’ve seen over the last plus since 1913, it’s lost 99% of its value. And we’ve printed more money in the last few years than we’ve printed in the last while since the country’s been around. And you know, that’s creating inflation, which is a devaluation of the dollar. And you know, these entities that we give our trust to, are taken advantage of that trust. And it happens in human cultures for 1000s of years, it’s been happening. And we continue to make the same mistakes because humans believe in goodness of others. And unfortunately, we should, what I always say here, “is never give up your power and your health, your wealth, or your time. People gave up their power and their wealth to this exchange. If they didn’t pull their keys off of the exchange, they might have lost all of their money. And that’s why I say “Never give up your power and your health, your wealth or your time.” Take control of your health. Take control of your time, take control of your money, because if you don’t, you might be subject to some crazy FTX fraud, potentially fraud brought upon by somebody like a Sam Bankman-Fried. I hope that’s instructive and helped you understand a little bit about what happened in this market. It’s crazy. Protect yourself, be careful, but there’ll be good times ahead. Take care.  

November 17, 2022

Cash Flow Is Important with Barry S. Rutten, CFP®

Welcome to another edition of the wealth architect podcast, we’ve got a fun one today might be a little bit controversial. I’m kind of excited about that, because I like controversy sometimes, especially when it comes to your finances. So who we have on today is, is a very esteemed guy, I got to talk to him before we started and the guy has a wealth of knowledge in the financial business. He’s a registered investment advisor, a certified financial planner. And we’re going to talk about some really cool things. And we’re going to try to open your mind to different ways of investing, we’re not going to give you any investing advice, because this is a show about education and information, we are going to kind of open your mind to some of the things that are out there. i hope you tune -in!

Links for Barry’s content:

www.WealthDefenseGroup.com http://www.wealthdefensegroup.com/BOBS www.WealthDefenseGroup.com/EXIT

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Cash Flow Machine Mentorship – http://www.cashflowmachine.io
BECOME A CLIENT -https://go.destinycreation.com/application-page

November 16, 2022

Keys to Passive Income With Russ Morgan

Today on the show I have a very special guest who is a co-founder and partner of a company called Wealth Without Wall Street which is an online community. And what it does is educates investors, actually it re-educates them, which I think is so cool. As you know, I could sit here and talk about that all day. So tune-in to learn more!

More about Russ Morgan: https://www.wealthwithoutwallstreet.com/

Mark’s website: www.cashflowmachine.io

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Cash Flow Machine Mentorship – http://www.cashflowmachine.io
BECOME A CLIENT -https://go.destinycreation.com/application-page

November 16, 2022

Tesla Crashing, Elon-haters or just BS?

Just a quick update today on Tesla. And Tesla, if you don’t know has been in the news a lot, and not in the news because of a lot of things they’ve done. But because of what their chairman Elon Musk has done. So, you know, Elon Musk, as you probably know by now, bought Twitter, and now he’s taken Twitter, private. Now he’s allowing more free speech, in my opinion. And I’m on Twitter. So, I see more speech, I don’t see a lot of hate speech, you know, I hear all these stories about how there’s all this hate speech now. And people are leaving, but I don’t see that? Maybe I’m just on a different feed or something. But I mean, I see more people being outspoken, and more people speaking out against censorship, which I did witness over the last couple of years. But I don’t see more hate speech.  

And so, there’s a multi-tiered thing that I just want to give you my opinion on. And I’m a big owner in my hedge fund of Tesla. I believe Tesla is a phenomenal company. And I believe it is destined for some really great things. And you’ve probably seen my videos on Tesla. But just briefly off the top of my head, I’ll tell you, not only the cars, the cars are a small part of what they do, but they are a critical part of what they do. Their car sales are increasing by leaps and bounds. There are also incentives that are being built into the new stimulus package, the inflation reduction at which is doesn’t have anything to do with inflation, except for increasing it, but those things are in there. And they’re giving electric vehicle buyers, certain incentives, and some of them may not qualify for Tesla, depending on when this is all said and done. But the more expensive cars are not supposed to get as much of an incentive, things like that. So that may affect them. But you know, they may adjust it, or Elon may adjust it.  

So, the move toward electric vehicles is a trend that we’re not going to stop, I’m not sure it’s a practical trend. But so, we got that then, because of the cars, there’s automated driving, which is not here yet, but it’s coming. And you know, these cars go like a million miles before they have a crash. And that’s way better than you and I do when we drive. So, when you when you pile in that and then you say, “okay, fetch me my car,” which the Tesla’s can do, they can, the car can come around and valet park itself and bring it back to the front of you. And you can get in from there like a valet. That’s pretty cool.  

Now let’s start to bolt on the other things to that autonomous driving, may be able to replace Uber. So, you might have a car. And if the car is going to sit eight hours at work, maybe that car could be automated, it can drive people around during that period of time. So now your car becomes a revenue generator, or maybe those that car is leased to you and it’s able to be used. That’s an incredible thing. I don’t know when that’s coming. But it seems like it’s really farfetched. But things happen a lot quicker with technology. All those miles that are being driven by all the people that are driving Tesla’s all goes back into their database. So, they get all this information about Tesla driving habits, accidents, more information about how to improve safety and things like that. Thereby being able to create an insurance company that they know the data, the driving data from this these millions of Tesla drivers around the country. And so, they know their habits, they know that their cars can prevent auto accidents. And that’s a profitable thing. That’s pretty cool. Nobody ever talks about it anymore. 

Now we get away from what Tesla does as a car company. And we look at what they do as a as an electricity producing company. So, they have these Tesla solar cells, they have the power wall, which works with your car to charge it and hold batteries and battery power from the solar panels, things like that. Then we look at what else Tesla is doing, or at least what Elon Musk is doing. He’s got Twitter now, he’s got SpaceX, which is blanketing the world in internet. And so that means more people are going to be coming into SpaceX and the to the internet, and more revenue profit generated from SpaceX. So that’s something that nobody’s talking about. But he’s got this other company called the Boring Company, which makes these tunnels underneath the ground. These are all dynamite things that he’s doing. And he’s actually doing most of them, the automated driving, all that kind of stuff. Some of its working. Some of it’s not turned on yet, but it’s coming. And so, if you look at Tesla as a longer-term opportunity, which I do, there’s no reason for Tesla to be going down. It’s gone down about 50 points in just a couple of weeks. And it’s at its 52-week low of right now. It’s about 189. This week, obviously a 52-week low, pretty lousy. If you’re looking at it, but nothing fundamentally changed. Here’s what’s changed. Tesla or Elon Musk bought Twitter.  

Now he’s being billed as this right-wing guy and so these woke companies like Pfizer and a few others. I have a whole list of them, are leaving Tesla as advertisers and which is to punish him because they don’t want to advertise because he’s now a right winger or something. He’s pretty much an independent, moderate, he’s always voted Democratic. And he’s kind of in the middle. If you look at his views, and I watch him on Twitter, he’s not radical. He’s not. He’s funny, actually. And so, like, all that is a bunch of crap. So, he’s going to lose some of those woke advertising companies. But he’s also reinstituting, this blue checkmark thing, which was really only available to some elite people, that paid a lot of money for that blue verification check mark. Now he’s making it available to everybody. And if you want to get rid of the bots, and all the fluff and all the junk on Twitter, that is, you know, not real people. And it’s, you know what it can be deemed hate speech, because it’s infiltrated by the Russians, or whatever conspiracy theories you want to have buy it. Now he’s going to be charging $8 a month. There’s a lot of users on Twitter, so if he can get half of them to pay $8 a month, think about the revenue stream that is going to create with $8 a month, and it’ll probably go up down the road. But for, you know, 96 bucks a year, you now have the ability to search better, you’ll have the ability to get rid of all the junk that’s in your Twitter feed, all the bots and all that are hitting you and have a better feed a better product, which will bring more advertising revenue.  

So Twitter is, well yes, it’s in the news. And while that’s a reason, quote, unquote, for people to be selling, I think these woke advertisers and maybe the woke traders in the world corporations are trying to drive Tesla down by shorting it teaching them a lesson. But at some point, those shorts start to get overwhelmed by a lot of people who believe in Tesla, people like me, people like the millennials, people that are Tesla owners, and they start to buy back the stock. And when they start to buy back the stock, the shorts get hammered. And when the shorts get hammered, they get squeezed. And when they get squeezed, they have to buy their short back otherwise it’s going to keep losing money can go up forever, in theory, right? And so that’s going to create, if I’m right, an acceleration to the upside on Tesla. Now, this is not financial advice. This is my opinion on Tesla. I’m an investor in Tesla not buying any more selling and more doing anything with it. I’m just looking at this going. Why is the company down like 5% a day for the last several days, for no reason, like nothing, you know what has changed. There’s some locked down COVID stuff going on in China. And so maybe fewer people are going to be buying fewer, not a lot fewer, but some fewer are going to be buying cars because they’ve been locked down. Maybe the factories are going to be closed for a couple more weeks this year. So, they’re going to have a little bit less production in China. Maybe that’s possible, we are going into a recession.  So, when nothing fundamental changes, by the way, it’s going up here now as I speak, when nothing fundamental changes on a company, don’t freak out. I don’t freak out. You shouldn’t freak out. But you should do your homework and decide if what I’m saying is right for you. I don’t know it’s right for me right now if something fundamental changes. I’m going to react I’m going to make a make a fundamental change with what I have. But right now, I don’t see much going on with Tesla. So, I’ll just sit back and watch and we’ll see what happens.  

November 16, 2022

Crypto, Cash Flow and Bitcoin With Josh Rhodes

If you have been following me, you know that I like crypto currency and crypto tech. And specifically, I like Bitcoin a bit more than the other ones. And so crypto is this fascinating new technology that everybody should have a little exposure to in their portfolio. We talk about how you can build things here at the wealth architect podcast, and how all the answers aren’t just real estate, passive income, the stock market, or gold. We like to look at all different kinds of investments. And if they’re not for you, they’re not for you. But today, we welcome a founder of crypto. He’s a full time crypto investor. He’s a crypto enthusiast. He’s a business owner, all around cool guy. I hope you tune-in to hear more from Josh Rhodes.

Josh’s link: https://www.cryptoyall.com/

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Cash Flow Machine Mentorship – http://www.cashflowmachine.io
BECOME A CLIENT -https://go.destinycreation.com/application-page

November 16, 2022

Can you prevent losses when the stock market is dropping?

I’ve been getting a lot of requests for answering some emails and I just figured I’d put it out, because I’m getting a lot of the same questions. And I figured I’d just go ahead and answer them right here. Make a video and see what we see where we go. I guess we’ll call it a first email that I got is from Katherine G. I’ve been investing for the last several years, and I’ve made good money in the stock market about 15% a year. But this year, my account is down over 60%. And I just sold everything. So, I need a new I need a new system. Does yours prevent losses?  

Katherine, welcome to the world of investing. It’s not always as easy as it seems like last few years, things just cranked up. And, you know, that’s because the Fed was printing all this money. I don’t know how deep you want to get me to go on this answer. But you know, it drove the markets up, like, just tons more money sloshing around and everything went up. And then when things started to change, and they started to change back in November, when the Fed said, they were going to start raising rates, everybody started to freak out. And so, you’re not alone, a lot of people have lost a lot of money, because what happened was the fed kicked off a bear market. So, they said, “We’re going to raise rates, that’s going to slow down the economy, that’s going to cause a recession, that’s going to cause an inflation problem. So, they’re going to try to reverse that, but they were going to reverse it by kind of slowing down the economy. So, you just have to know that fluctuations are part of the game, you haven’t really had to sit through those, but they’re a part of the game.  

Now you have to have a strategy for that. That’s really the key, you have to have a strategy. And a lot of people, they read this stuff, or they hear Cramer or they, read fortune, and they hear this thing about diversification. And I can tell you, diversification does work. It just doesn’t work within asset classes.  

So, if you buy the S&P 500, which is the 500 biggest stocks, you know, the ones you know about Microsoft, and Google and Apple, and Exxon and IBM.. I can go on for 500 stocks, Coca Cola, etc. If you do those 500 stocks, you’re diversified among all the stocks, the problem is, when everybody is selling everything, that diversification doesn’t really help you. So in a bad market, like we just had the last seven or eight months, everything got sold up. So what good was diversification, I mean, the only thing that really didn’t get sold off that much was real estate, and gold, right? Every other asset class that I can think of including the safest money out there, bonds for example, got sold off. So if you’re going to be an asset, you might as well be in assets that are paying you and that have a little bit of a component of risk, because if you’re going to be going down anyway, you might as well be able to make money when they’re going back up. So that’s, that’s that part of it. 

 

Look, I have to be honest, I lost money in the first half of the year, too, right? You’re not alone, I just didn’t lose as much as most people, because I was in a stock that went down 50%. And I was only down half of that for just a little while. And now we’ve made almost all of it back. And it’s only been, you know been a few months. So, we’re talking about the first six months of the year. And now by August, we’ve made all that up because we have a strategy. Our strategy is called the cash flow machine. And we make safe, reliable income. We take a stock, and we sell options against it, we have a whole bunch of strategies, rules and things like that, around it to limit emotions. But then you know, that’s the engine that allows us to kind of stay in the market. When everybody sells it like you did, I know you sell it, because you’re just like, you didn’t want to lose more than that. And I get it. The problem is, you make an emotional decision you sell out at the bottom, and then you’re not there for the recovery. And not necessarily that every stock is going to recover. There are some stocks that are down 85- 90% that are never going to come back. So, you have to kind of know which ones there are. But even in those stocks, if you do the cash flow machine strategy, and you get that reliable income every month or every week, or however often you want to do in the system, you get to kind of make up for the lost time. And then on the way back, you’re way ahead of the game because you haven’t lost as much and now, you’re bouncing back because you’re still in it. The main thing is to use a proven strategy, to stick with the strategy and don’t quit. So don’t do a buy and hold because that’s a horrible strategy. “I’m just going to buy and hold it until whatever and it always be worth something later.” It’s not always worth something later. It’s might be worth nothing later, but it’s not always, so no guarantees in any in any investing. But yeah, if you have a proven strategy, you could look back, and you can prove it with back tests and years and years of research and things like that. It doesn’t always work. But the probabilities are your favorite friend in this market, you want the probabilities to be in your favor? That’s just the way this game is played. It’s like, how much risk you have to take for how much reward you get. It’s called asymmetric risk, if you’re only going to make this much reward, but you’re taking this much risk, you’re really got it backwards, you’ve got to be at the spot where you’re taking a little bit of risk, but you’re going to make a lot of reward. So that’s an important thing. The other part of it is to have an income as part of your component.  

I close on this because I think I’ve gone on long enough with this little question, Katherine, but maybe, maybe this is helpful. That is, let’s say you own a house, and it’s a house that you rent out. Okay, so you have some tenants in there. You’re not looking at the value of the house on Zillow every day, are you? You’re just collecting your rent every month? Well, that’s what we do we collect the rent no matter what, as long as the tenants there, we’re going to get that monthly rental, no matter what house could go up 100,000, it could go down 100,000. But at the end of the day, we care about that income component, that income component keeps us in that investment. And that investment continues to cashflow until the market could come around and come back. Because there’s always some utility in that house. Now, I’m not saying there’s always utility in every stock. But if you’re in a good stock, then you’re way ahead of the game.  

So, we have four cornerstones in our cash flow machine. We start with the right stock. That’s a really critical thing. Everyone’s like, what stock should I buy? It’s more than that. But we start with that the right stock in the right market. So, when the markets just tanking going down like it’s done for the last eight months, it’s not the right market. So, it’s tough, it’s tough to swim upstream. We got the right stock, the right market at the right spot on the chart, not every spot on the chart that you want to be in a stock, right, sometimes you’re going down, and they’re breaking down. You don’t want to be in those stocks, if you can help it or you want to have some strategy that’s going to help you on the downside, protect your downside. And then what we do is we collect the rent for stocks, we squeeze the juice because we collect that rent from that stock as safe, reliable income.  I’m sorry, you lost money. And we do have a strategy for you. If you want to reach out, we’ll have conversation with you. But the bottom line is that to have a proven strategy, stick with it, don’t quit. And at the other end of it, if you had a good strategy, you will come out on top.

November 16, 2022

Expenses Killing You-It can drastically hurt your retirement

I want to share a story with you from somebody that our team ran into this week, and I want to just share it with you, because this is not uncommon out there. This person is getting really close to retirement, and we’re all thinking about retirement, right? We want to hopefully move that lower and lower number right, so we can retire sooner, we’d love to work. When we’re 65-70 years old, we want to retire early, early. Anyway, this person is about close to retirement is actually retired and went back to work part time. And their planning to stop working in the next year. Now the person is already has some good investments. And by the way, you know, this is an opinion. So, if you want investment advice, go find a financial planner. This is an opinion, do your own research. Okay, so this person has real estate five investments in real estate, which is great mutual funds, and the mutual funds totally told us, they’re paying a 1.8% fee, that’s what they see. Now, I want to tell you something about mutual funds, real quick. Mutual funds, I have to tell you what they’re paying. But there’s a lot of hidden fees that are in there, too, that you have to dig to find what they are; b1 fees, sales fees, there’s expense ratios, all kinds of little fees, that really, there was a study done a few years ago, add up to about 3.4%. Now, that’s your 3.4%. So that’s right off the top. So, if you have a great year, if you’re making 30% of your money, that’s great, but a year, like this year, you’re losing 10, 15, 20 or 30%, some people have money in Facebook and zoom, and they’ve lost 80% of their money, right? But still, that broker gets paid that 3.4% Every year, and it comes right off the top right out of your money. So, you got to be careful about having other people manage your money.  

I have a saying and you know it, “never give up your power in your health, your wealth or your time.” And this is part of that saying is that to be able to take control of what you’re doing. Ronald Reagan said, “Trust, but verify.” So, if you’re going to have other people handling your money, just make sure they know what they’re doing, make sure they’re doing it right. And that you can look over their shoulder and go, “Okay, I agree with this investment philosophy.” That means you have to take power into your hands to learn some of this stuff, it’s your money, you should know about it.  

All right. Now this person said they lost 10% of their mutual funds in the recent downturn. Now, I don’t know when this recent downturn was that they’re talking about, but I can tell you that the S&P 500 was down about 22% recently. Some stocks, like I just mentioned, Netflix and Zoom and Upstart were down like 85%, some stocks are down 70-80%, maybe 90%, the market in general is down 20%. So, if they lost only 10% of their mutual fund, I have to say, congratulations, that’s awesome. You didn’t lose as much money as the regular market. And they’re mostly a buy and hold trader. Now I call it buy and hope, because you don’t have any control. And then just well, I’m just going to keep buying. So thereby a buy and hold investor and they’re just buying and holding. Now, if you held that stock that went down, 80%, you’re going to have to hold a long time for it to go back up to even, we’re not investing to get even are we? So, you know, if you invested in a stock that goes down 8% It’s got to go up about nine or 10% to get back to even. If you invest in a stock that goes down 50% now it’s got to go up 100% to get back, it’s got to double. How many stocks double? If you know, let me know, because I can invest with you. And then if it goes down 80% it’s going to be years before you get that money back, right? Yes, it’s Netflix, and it’s not going to go out of business or whatever you tell yourself, but it’s going to be a long time before it climbs back up and goes through all those sellers that sold on the way down.  

So, buying and holding is a just a weak strategy. It In theory, it works. Because the markets, in theory, go up over time. It’s actually the dollar is the basing over time, that’s a different issue. But you know, it doesn’t always go up like right now, like people are having a lot of trouble. Hedge funds are going out of business, because they can’t figure out what to buy and when to buy, what to short or what to sell. And it’s been crazy out there. And this person wants something they could do in retirement and they liked the idea of being able to travel while they invest. So they’re looking for basically another career. And I highly recommend if you got any kind of money at all, that you should learn how to handle it, you should learn how to invest it. So let me let me boil this down. You need to have some kind of a system, a proven system that gives you safe reliable income and income that comes in no matter what, right? If you don’t have to wait for the government five years for the stock to come back. You know, so you can make a capital gain, you get income. We have a system called the cash flow machine where we teach people how to make safe, reliable income and we shoot for two to 4% a month. We frequently overshoot but I’m here to talk to you about how great people are doing. Because it’s been a tough year this year as well, we just haven’t lost as money as much money as the rest of the market has. And so, we are actually backup to even and the markets come back a little. And that engine that gives us that safe, reliable income helps us helps us do that. Now, if you’re going to learn a system, you should learn a system that’s proven. Why do we learn a proven system? Well, it’s like anything, if you want to learn anything, you don’t just you know. If you want to learn golf, you don’t just pick up a golf club and go to the golf course and figure out that you’re going to be a great golfer. You’re probably going to read a book, I’m reading a book, does it make you a great golfer? Maybe, or maybe you take a course, right? But buying a ticket, of course doesn’t make you a great golfer, maybe you go practice, right? That’s cool. But sometimes you might practice the wrong thing. So, you get a coach. Well, now you’re getting there, right? Now he could see some things that you’re doing right or wrong, and have you fixed them right there and then to start practicing those correctly. I can tell you that I’m really good at hitting a slice, because I practice it for a lot of years. It wasn’t till I got a coach and I figured out what I was doing wrong to get rid of that slice. So, you’ve got to be immersed in an ecosystem that’s going to support you. And it’s going to teach you the right way to do things and it’s going to teach you from experience of what other people have done. We have a system called the cash flow machine that makes safe reliable income. And it does it from the stock market. We take a stock market asset like Amazon, or Apple or Tesla stock. And we basically create our own dividends from it, we create our own rental and if you want to look at it as a real estate analogy, and that helps us make what we shoot for,, 2 to 4% a month. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but it adds up. And if you can stay away from the pitfalls of losing money, you can end up making money over time.  

So, if you’re going to be invested in mutual funds, just understand that mutual funds have hundreds, maybe 1000s of stocks, no, you’re not going to do that. Well, because there’s crappy stocks that are weighing down a mutual fund. There’s good stocks that are doing well. And there’s average stocks in there, why not get rid of all the average ones, and just focus really well on the things that are doing well. And that’s creating a safe, reliable income strategy. From having a proven system, we can tell you more about it if you want to text us or message us or figure out how to get a hold of us. But that’s really the key. And that’s was the key to this person. Great job on having real estate, real estates, that passive income most of the time but you still have to plunge that toilet in the morning, sometimes, but five properties in real estate. That’s good concentration. Mutual funds, not so sure, right? This person said they lost 10% on mutual funds in the recent downturn. I don’t know maybe that’s okay. I’d rather have control of it and be able to create income off of that. So that’s the situation. That’s how we kind of want to figure out the way things go in retirement. And I hope that helps you as well.  

November 10, 2022

England’s Currency In Trouble

I want to talk to you about something that’s probably the most important story that we’ve had since 2008. And I mentioned on my podcast last week, that things are starting to break, I talked about the Bank of England and talked about the British pound, I talked about the yen, things are starting to break a little bit. And this week, we had a major calamity in the in the pound and it all started with inflation. So, we’ve printed all this money for the last couple of years and we’ve driven up inflation. Well, the Fed and the central banks around the world, including the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and Brussels, you know, handling the euro, everybody’s just cranking, cranking the money printing up at the same time. And it’s caused all this inflation.  

Well, when it does that, and then all of a sudden, they realize, “Oh, my, we got inflation”, then they have to raise rates, or they think they have to raise rates. I’m not so sure about that. So, they’re raising rates so that we bring the economy down, and then when things start to go into a tailspin, then we get deflation, which is actually a bigger problem. So, the Bank of England realized how much inflation there was. And there’s a new prime minister called Liz Truss there. And so, she needs to come in and impress everybody that she’s doing a good job. She said, “You know, I ran on this platform that we’re going to lower taxes.” And she came in with this thing to lower taxes. Well, what did that do? That freak out all the bond markets. The bonds are owned by tons of pensions, the pensions in England own bond market, bonds from England. And so, the bond market actually got it just kind of dried up, right? Do you liquefy it? And so, what happens is when anything gets lack of liquidity, there becomes a run on that. And when there’s a run on it, people start to grab it, they sell it and so there was a plummeting of the bond market. Well, what happened was that Liz Truss said, “okay, after one day, she said, I’m not going to raise the rates, I’m not going to lower the rates on taxes, I’m just going to leave them the way they were.”  

And the Bank of England said, “you know, we’re going to do, we’re going to print more money, and we’re going to buy those bonds.” So, calm down, everybody, everything’s fine. We’ve got inflation, we’ve got a pension fund, liquidation problem, we’ve got Bank of Japan raising rates, and into an inflationary environment. And then now they’re going to say they’re going to lower rates. So, what they’re doing is they’re saying, “Don’t worry, we’re going to raise enough money printed out of thin air, and we’re going to buy those bonds.” Okay, what does that do? Well, that calms the bond market down for a little while, just a little while. The British pound, that’s what I’m trying to say the British pound went from, like 112, down to 103. And now it’s back to 111. So, it had this huge thing.  

Now, anytime you get a market that’s unsure about what’s going on, you get liquidity crisis, you get all kinds of manipulation. When you end up doing that, you create what’s called poor purchasing. And so, things go up and they go down, they go up, and they go down. And when they go up and down, that quickly, it starts to freak people out. And what they do, they pull their money to the side. And so we’re this close, with our first major central bank about to fail.  

Now, think about the repercussions in the world when our first major central bank and the central bank fails, right? If the Bank of England fails, it’s a contagion that will probably go to the Bank of Japan. It’s already happened in some really small countries. So, it’s starting to go from one country to the next. And if it happens, it’s going to happen in the US at some point. I don’t know when? Maybe we’re still the strong one in town. But it’s going to happen at some point. So, just calling your attention to it that you don’t need to know what’s going on in the world all the time. But you should have an idea of how it affects your finances. That’s what we do here on the wealth architect podcast, you should know what’s going on in the world, because it does affect your finances. And if we have a major crash in any central bank, a failure of a central bank where people just don’t even believe in the in the Bank of England’s money anymore, they don’t believe in the pound. And all of a sudden, they just sell all the pounds and the pound becomes this hyperinflationary thing and it becomes worthless, like so many other currencies have done in history. We’re in a load of trouble and the rest of the world has to come in and bail them out. And if they can’t bail them out, because their own currencies are weak, because they’ve been doing the wrong thing with currencies for the last several years. You can call it the last 12 years or you can call the last 100 years depends on what you want ever since the institution and fiat money. If all that starts to happen, we got a major worldwide calamity or major worldwide problem. I don’t know if that’s going to happen or not. I hope it doesn’t. But we’re starting to see the cracks in the system. And I’m just trying to keep you abreast of it. Because if you’re caught in it and you’re not prepared for it, it could take you down. I hope that helps you a little bit. And I hope at least this keeps you aware of what’s going on to the world.  

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