RG 245 – Wealth Without Wall Street: Building Your 5 Pillars of Wealth w/ Russ Morgan & Joey Mure

This week on the show I am chatting with two legends, Russ Morgan and Joey Mure, hosts of the successful podcast, Wealth Without Wall Street.

We all know the secret to wealth creation is getting your money working for you, and not for someone else. Both Russ and Joey are hugely passionate about providing the best financial insight and education for individuals, business owners and investors nationwide. They have created the Wealth Without Wall Street community to help others make better investment decisions and take control of their financial future.

We dive deep into the topics of:

• Understanding the wall street mindset and how to avoid its pitfalls;
• Creating the 5 wealth pillars without the use of wall street;
• The benefits of peer to peer investing platforms and communities;

And much, much more.

So what are you waiting for? Russ and Joey are truly top blokes who want to help the average investor.

Be Bold, Be Brave, and Go Give Life a Crack!

Reed (01:31):

Welcome to investing in the U S, a podcast for real estate investors, business owners, and aspiring entrepreneurs looking to break into the U S market. Join Reed as he interviews go getters, risk-takers, and the best in the business about their journey towards financial freedom, and the sheer joy of creating something from nothing.

Reed (03:18):

Today I have the pleasure of speaking with the dangerous duo, Russ Morgan and Joey Mure. Russ and Joey are on a mission to help educate and change the mindset of individuals, business owners, and investors nationwide. When it comes to building wealth and breaking the shackles of traditional wall street investing, they both co-host the up and coming podcast called “The Wealth Without Wall Street” podcast. And I’m really pumped and excited to have them on the show today to share their incredible insight in their knowledge, but not for the meet. Let’s get them out of here. Get highlights. Welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

Russ (03:58):

Good day, my friend. Glad to be here. Thanks for you for having us, man. That’s an Alabama good day to you.

Reed (04:06):

Yes, yes. And you boys are dialing in from Birmingham, Alabama. How’s the weather down there right now?

Russ (04:14):

Yeah, it’s actually been more mild than normal. This time of year had some actually like mornings in the seventies and stuff. That just means 89 instead of 99.

Reed (04:27):

I was just in Texas last week. I’m sure, like Alabama, as soon as you walk outside, you start sweating because of the humidity, very similar to where I’m from in Australia. So I understand your pain and living here in Los Angeles, a little bit dry heat, which is I like it. Thank you. Forget the humidity part of it or let’s, let’s get into it. So the first question I ask all my guests, when they come on, the show is rewind the clock and tell me how you made your first ever dollar as a kid. And I’ll let Russ go first. Yeah.

Russ (04:55):

Yeah. I was thinking through that question and it probably goes back to maybe first grade, Joey. I don’t know if you know this about me, but I was a scavenger. So in order to make money, I actually went out in my neighbor’s yard. So we lived in kind of a rural area and I would go pick pecans off the ground. And I would take them to like this little farmer’s market, sort of like people do with cans, right? You can take cans to back to the recycling bin and I would take the pecans to this farmer’s market and they would give us, and I don’t even know how much it was per pound, but that was, I was like carrying a five gallon bucket. So it was really the more like exercising and making money all at the same time. But that’s a real, that’s the real side hustle there when you’re, you’re out scavenger in somebody’s yard. And you’re like, what is this kid doing? He’s like cleaning up my yard. I was like, no, I’m literally cleaning up. I’m trying to get money.

Joey (05:58):

Mine, not nearly as industrious. Uh, I went to a bunch of different summer camps growing up, and then it was kind of one of those natural things that once I got old enough to go and work for the camp, I was like, well, I want to hang out at the camp anyway. I might as well get paid to be here. So I was like dishwashing in the in the mess hall there. And that was a blast. I mean, you kind of only worked a few hours of the day and then you’re free the rest of the time. So I had a blast with that, but I think the, the most I guess industrious way in college, I actually ran valet. And that was like the most efficient job in college, because you could work for like four or five hours in an afternoon or something, and people were giving you tips plus minimum wage. And yeah, it was, it was a very, very lucrative job. All my friends were making minimum wage and all of a sudden here and just mopping up, had to wear white tennis shoes though.

Reed (06:52):

Well, I love the dish washing because I was a dish pig growing up as well. And I remember working in an Italian restaurant and being so hungry. Let it not like scooping the bottom of the pot, trying to get like the last mouthful of risotto before chucking it into the dishwasher.

Joey (07:08):

You didn’t want to eat this stuff at the camp. I promise you,

Reed (07:13):

Well, let’s, let’s get into the journey. I want to know a little bit about how you guys came together. It sounds like you’re pretty good friends and mates. So did you grow up and, and what was the journey before you hit, went down this path of becoming entrepreneurs?

Joey (07:26):

So I’ll, I’ll say Russ and I were actually really good friends before we ever got involved in any sort of business relationship. We went to church together in Sunday school together, sat next to each other all the time. And at one point I was in the mortgage business and he was in the financial world. He was learning a lot of these things that we now teach. And he said, Hey, it’s okay if I start sending you referrals to my clients, I’m like yes, that would work. And he said, if you’re going to do that, you’re going to have to read this book. And you’re going to have to kind of come, come with me on some of these different seminars. And I’m like, okay, I’ll do it. And then he charged me for the book, which was, I thought was low, you know, Hey, give me $20.

Joey (08:04):

I’m like, okay, I guess so. And anyways, that really sparked a relationship where he was teaching me the things I was searching for. And that’s what really became the kind of the spark that was like, man, why don’t more people know this. And after working with him for four years as a client, I was like, man, I’m passionate about this. Like we need to be, we need to be kind of teaming up here. And a two is better than one, get the word out. And that’s kind of how we broke off and started Wealth Without Wall Street. So basically really set out as his hero, his mentor, and has got along the way, all those things. Exactly. He’s patting himself on the back, literally right now and physically,

Reed (08:51):

What book was it that you gave him?

Russ (08:52):

Gave him a book that was written back in 2000 , called Becoming Your Own Banker. It was something that was new to me at the time. Cause I came out of a typical financial planning background. I was a certified financial planner. I like to say now that I’m a recovering certified financial planner, but yeah, that was a book by man named Nelson Nash.

Reed (08:56):

And so was there a pain point in your careers individually that forced you to become the partnership you are today? Like it’s clearly your, your whole message is wealth without wall street. You want to escape the shackles of what we’ve been told traditionally is how you invest. So was that through personal pain or was it just more the fact that you just, you couldn’t do what everyone’s telling you to do for the rest of your life and you didn’t figure out a better way of making? Yes.

Russ (09:40):

So we, when Joey came to work with me, we were at like a typical financial planning firm. They had sorta adopting some of these concepts that were, that what we would say outside of wall street. But at the same time, they were still managing, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars and investment dollars. And so for us, it seemed counterproductive. It was like, you know, we were, we were sitting there railing on wall street, but every day we walked in this building pretending that we were self-employed, but we were really kind of employees to some degree of this financial firm that had a ticker on the wall. You know what I mean? And for us, it was like this, this doesn’t fit what we’re trying to accomplish. So we decided to, you know, say, Hey look, you know, the, the most successful people that we’re helping are entrepreneurs, we really have that spirit.

Russ (10:29):

Anyway, we were kind of leading the group if you will. And ultimately dragging them. It’s like, I don’t know if you ever have a dog and you’re trying to get them to go somewhere for me. It’s trying to get them in the back of my truck. And he’s just like, you know, sitting down, you know, like just everything in their body trying to keep from, you know, being pulled. And that’s what that financial firm was like. We were just pulling them along the way. If I were like, let’s just turn loose of this thing and let’s just go out on our own.

Reed (10:57):

So at that point of turning loose, did you have a bunch of clients that you were already promoting products to? And I guess we should define for those listeners out there. What do you, what do you guys define as outside wall street? Investing.

Russ (11:10):

Outside for us is well, wall street for, for anything that we talk about is more about a mindset, right? There’s this process. I think we’re people operate in the dark if you will, when it comes to finance. And a lot of people have been searching for a way out, but not knowing what the light is. And sometimes going in the wrong direction. Sometimes they seek advisers who are just in the dark as well as they are. And for some people being in the dark creates anxiety, but for some people it’s sleep. Right. And so when we talk about operating outside of wall street, not only is it products, but it’s mindset. So we think anything that has to do with stocks and bonds and traditional mutual fund investing, 401ks, that kind of stuff is we would consider wall

Russ (11:54):

Street, anything that is outside of that, whether that’s investing in businesses, whether it’s in real estate, online space, any lending in any operation that could be considered something outside of that typical advisory space is what we would say is outside of wall street.

Reed (12:13):

Got it. Got it.

Joey (12:17):

Well, I would add to that is just to kind of give further I guess, meat on the bone. So to speak as to what Russ is talking about is wall street kind of, has you bought into this idea that retirement is an act that happens when you’re in your sixties or seventies and you’re, you’re just abdicating your money to somebody that is this. We like to call them a money babysitter, right? Somebody that’s just kind of watching over it. And you, you don’t feel like you have to be engaged in the process of building your own wealth because you’re handing it off to somebody else and time and time again, I mean, no different than even current day we’re, we’re left wanting and lacking because that person is not watching our money better than we can. It’s like the idea of a babysitter. Russ tells a story of coming home and finding his babysitter asleep and his kids running around them.

Joey (13:15):

And you’re like, wait a minute, you should be watching my kids, but it’s anti-climactic for us to think that somebody is going to care for our kids or our money better than ourselves. And we also think that like waiting until you’re 65 or 70 to start truly living and not creating cashflow today, that’s a villain. Like that’s a mindset, it’s a limiting belief that we have to break free of. And we have to say, man, it is possible. And I need to take action today to take control, to make it happen in two years, three years, 10 years, even if it took us 10 years, we’re talking about shaving 30 years off the timeframe that the typical advice is going to get you. So that, that kind of adds a little bit more, you know, depth to what we’re talking about.

Reed (14:06):

And I think the whole underlying message here is that really wall street and the vehicles you just described are pretty much an industrialized revolution since the 1956, after the second world war, they’ve only really been around for 60 years. And prior to that, everyone was an entrepreneur and was sort of doing their own thing and creating their own wealth through different ways at the turn of the century and all that sort of stuff. And now we’re seeing a shift back to that sort of days where people like are waking up to the fact that, Hey, this is not what I don’t want to live till I’m 65 and then start living. And so I think it’s when you start looking at from a really macro point of view, it’s actually running in a relatively recent in history time that we’ve had these types of vehicles to correct unquote wealth, but then people are seeing that they’re not actually, as they’re all cracked up to what everyone’s telling them that they’re cracked up to be.

Reed (14:54):

And so that’s the people that are finding other ways in educating themselves and other ways to go out and create cashflow today so they can start living a life on their terms and not have to wait till they’re 65. And I completely agree with everything you guys have just said, part of what my, why was my pain was like, I just didn’t wanna live in a cubicle for the next 40 years of my life. You know, I wanted to be my own boss. So I think that’s a, that’s really, really incredible stuff. So tell me a little bit about from a Chinese menu point of view, what are you guys offer from a services, everything from the free appetizers all the way through to the market price lobster?

Joey (15:26):

No, no, well I don’t know what number 23 is on the list, but the way that we operate Reed, is first is we believe in education as the starting point of everything. Like, so we’re always going to tell somebody the first investment is in yourself. And so we’ve built out like our free menu, if you will, or free appetizer the chips on the table at the Mexican restaurant that we just dominated yesterday, Joey, that was completely outside of my diet, but that for us is like we build a whole online community and it’s about 2,500 people in it right now. And inside of there anything from budgeting courses, debt courses every different passive income idea that we have run across in the last two and a half years after interviewing a hundred, 150 different entrepreneurs. And it’s amazing to me how many different ways there are to create cashflow to the main thing that we do that is we actually set up these dividend paying life insurance contracts as a place where people store cash ultimately then toward pointing them toward different groups and communities that are on the path to getting financially free.

Joey (16:38):

And so we have you know, paid for subscription courses and stuff like that inside of our community as well.

Reed (16:46):

So it sounds like you guys are really the new era of financial advisors, so to speak it’s, it’s, it’s outside that traditional space and it’s really through the eductation trying to make sure that people are aware of the different other avenues that they can create the cashflow that they need in order to set themselves up. And to what you said before Joey shaved 20, 30 years off that quote unquote retirement plan and start living a little bit more today. Yeah.

Joey (17:10):

Well, we like to think of ourselves as, as connectors. I think it’s a really a God given ability that Russ and I have is to go and seek the truth. We talk about delight, right? Because people are naturally in the dark when it comes to finances and we want to do is give them the light and bring them to that point. And, and really that comes into the idea that one, this is possible, but they don’t know where to start. And so we want to curate the best content, the best practitioners of whatever that may be, maybe it’s syndicating apartments, maybe it is, you know, wholesaling

Joey (17:50):

Properties. Maybe it is subject to maybe it’s online businesses, all these, we want to bring the experts in the one place. And like you said, be the, the new era where people are empowered to take action towards those things. And see, man, I don’t have to just accept the way that my parents told me that they had to do it and people see how disappointing that was. Right. So they want something.

Russ (18:16):

Well, and I would say too, like the typical financial advisor that you would probably think of is really wanting you to transfer their, your money to them and them to manage it and hold onto it for as long as possible while they get wealthy using it. And, and for our part, like, we, we don’t want you to give us your money. Like that’s not our objective. Like we teach people how you become successful, not how we become successful and you become successful.

Russ (18:43):

Hopefully through us, we try to teach people a process of how to put money in motion and, you know, the things that we’re in every single day and, and beautifully being taught back from our clients as they are coming up with new ways and ideas to use money that we hadn’t even considered is really a journey all in of itself. Because I mean, really the part of this is that what I love is hearing like, you know, we love using this analogy of people operating in a tunnel for instance, in the dark, but is when people see the lie, they see what really a financial freedom looks like and they go experience it. We love seeing how they go back in the dark and grab people that they know of that were in the dark and bring them back out with them. And that’s kind of what really inspires Joey and I to keep getting up every day is that we are not the hero in this story.

Russ (19:30):

We’re just a part of the beggar showing the other beggars where the bread is. And as Joey says, the connecting part of that, we were gifted in that way. We love connecting with people. And when we hear new stories, we want to share it. And thankfully we get in the way, because what we do is help entrepreneurs who are great at making money, but are terrible at keeping it. We show them a great place to keep it, but then we also show them how to get it going again and put it back in motion. And we’ll get to hear those stories down the road. It’s never about, man. I’m so glad I bought that whole life insurance policy through you guys. It’s always, man. I can’t believe the things I’m doing with my money today and where we are and what that has provided for our family and how many friends I’ve shared with this. There’s the stories, there’s the wins. And we just, you know, have that halo effect. We just happened to be around for that for the good news.

Reed (20:20):

Right? Right. You talk about education. And one of the things that I’ve noticed on your website is these five pillars to building wealth without wall street. You want to walk us through what those five pillars are.

Russ (20:30):

So I think that’s really kind of, if you think about the process that we walk people through is first and foremost, if you don’t know where you’re spending money, if you don’t know where money is leaking, quote unquote, out of your control, then you obviously are out of control. And

Joey (20:48):

So the first, if we’re going to take control, we’re going to start with cash flow. So we have, we walk people through a budgeting course and you know, don’t, don’t turn me off right now because I said the word budget, we’re talking about like a budgeting course that you’ve never seen. That’s automating your budget. And it’s, wasn’t created by Russ or I it’s by one of our clients and friends who has really mastered this. And so once you know your budget, now you can then look for other ways that you may be leaking cashflow in the way of how you pay down debt, how you pay your mortgage, how you pay your taxes. So we have tax attorneys and accountants in our community who are helping people to shave those things down every single year to gain more and more control the money that would have been going to the IRS anyway.

Joey (21:34):

So that would be the first step is cashflow. The second one then turns into where we, we create an opportunity fund right now we can save efficiently. And that opportunity fund, as Russ mentioned, is what that book becoming your own banker was based off of is really creating store houses for our cash in these dividend, paying whole life insurance policies, designed for cash, not necessarily for the protection piece we always associate with life insurance. And so we are experts in that space and we have an entire community within our community where we’re diving deep into how to use these policies to better than invest in the last three pillars. And Russ mentioned those before, but real estate business and lending. So those are kind of overarching, you know, topics or, or what have you. But underneath those there’s hundreds of strategies that people then use the cash from their policies to invest and create cashflow in the one of those three pillars. So we want people to choose one of those paths that aligns with what their goals are and what their passions are, and then create as, as fast as they can create freedom, because we don’t want to defer life. We want to live it today.

Reed (22:57):

And when you talk about whole life insurance policy, do you want to maybe break down? We’ve had a few people on the show talking about having [inaudible] on the show, talking about the infinite banking system. I’ve had a couple other people on the show, but maybe for those people that haven’t listened to that episode, talk a little bit about what that means in and around the life insurance policy. Yeah,

Russ (23:16):

Well, it’s read this is you know, was a a niche area that be honest with you. I was in the the financial industry for over four years and never heard about it. You know, I was a certified financial planner. I was investing in all the typical things that most people would their advisors would help them with. And I was exposed to this concept of using a dividend paying life insurance contract, which when I thought about that, like all the study that I had told me, like, this is something for like an 80 year old grandma, didn’t

Russ (23:46):

Like the bank for whatever reason. So she decided she went and put it in her CD. She’s going to stick it over here. But it’s a little bit more than that because the guy who showed it to me, he said, well, let me first tell you something. For instance, Joey worked at Wells Fargo bank, one of the second largest banks in the U S and he said, let me show you the balance sheet, a Wells Fargo bank, and kind of go through and, and show you where their assets are. And he said, look down here, this, this line 31, it shows you a life insurance assets held by Wells Fargo bank. And it was $18 billion of cash value. And I was like, what? And he said, let’s scroll up just a little bit. And let’s look at real estate properties. That’s all the bank buildings.

Russ (24:26):

Well, Wells Fargo has across the U S and it says like $12 billion. He’s going to give you perspective of what banks do with money. They put it in the safest place that they can use it because banks make money by lending money. But that’s how that that’s, you know, for a grocery store, the inventory on the shelves are, are their products, right? For you as a real estate syndicator, the apartment complexes are your inventory for banks. Cash is inventory. And so their goal is to, to have as much access to it as possible and to keep it liquid so that they can put it in motion. And he said, this is, this is what Russ, you need to be teaching your clients. You need to show them how to store hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, whether that’s per month, per year, over the lifetime, depending on the person you’re working with in this place as a flow through to something that’s going to create cash flow, like something like you do, Reed.

Russ (25:21):

And so when I started learning about this, I was like, wait a second. I didn’t realize that this could be designed in a way that I could actually build lots of cash as early as month one, right? I mean, most life insurance policies that are out there. And if you’re listening to this, you might either own one currently, or have owned one in the past. And you look down at the balance of your, you know, what you’ve put in there, and there’s not that much money. And it’s because typical life insurance is bought for a death benefit where these contracts are actually the way we build them and the way we were showed. And we just, again, modeling what the banks were actually doing themselves, was building it off of how much cash can I put in here at the smallest death benefit that the government will allow me.

Reed (26:07):

So maybe walk us through an example because I don’t want to jump to the conclusion, but so let’s just, let’s just use it a million dollars example. So you have a million bucks and you place it in one of these whole life insurance. What can I do with it next? Yeah.

Russ (26:45):

So so lots of different ways to design a policy, right? So most of our clients, if it’s all right, let me give you an example. That’s a very typical model, right? Somebody comes to us and says, Hey, look, you know, I’ve been very successful so far. I’ve done. That’s been in every dollar that I make. And let’s say I make $500,000 a year. And I spent $200,000 a year. So I got 300,000 of cash flow in the past. I’ve put that in as much as I could into my SEP IRA, the rest I put in cash. And then I just buy real estate out of it. Right. And we say, what should I do then? I said, well, okay, well, we could take that 300,000 of cashflow or $30,000 of cashflow or 3000 cash or whatever the number is. And we can shove this into an insurance policy.

Russ (27:26):

Do you have any other cash along with that? Well, yeah, I’ve got like $500,000 sitting over here just for a rainy day, you know? Cause if deals go bad that that’s going to happen. This was something Joey always would do is he was store lots of cash because he was in a commission-based environment. Yep. And so then we would design an insurance policy, maybe using those numbers off that $300,000 a year of cashflow and the half a million dollars they have. So they put in 800,000 in year one. And we, we have asked, so about 600 to 650,000 of that 800, they won or the, when they get it in there at the end of the year, if they put it in their monthly or whatever. So then they come to, to a guy like you Reed and they say, Hey, if I give you half a million dollars, what can you do with it?

Russ (28:10):

And that’s up to you, right? Whatever, whatever you do and whatever that you know, preferred return and other profit sharing mechanisms you guys have in your, in your funds. And then they say, okay, well now I have this extra cashflow, how do, what do I do with that cash flow? Well, what they’ve done is literally they’ve, they’ve collateralized an asset, Reed. We’re also familiar with that as real estate investors, where we have an asset, which is the real estate. And we often times have loans against that in the form of lines of credit or whatever their insurance policies act just the same way. The difference is is that there’s no credit check on there. There’s no limitation to them being able to access it up to what they have in it. And the beauty of it is that the growth internally in the insurance policy happens, regardless if they’re invested in your deal or not.

Russ (28:59):

So our clients love the fact that they get to have their dollars doing two things, one earning a, say three to 4% tax-free return after all the insurance costs, after paying for Joey’s you know, new car or whatever it is that they get that. But also they get the investment that they put in the money into. And then as they, you know, are, are finding uses for that cashflow, they’re just replenishing the loan that they’ve taken out from the insurance company, which is a great place to store the cash that allows them to do it again. Does that answer your question?

Reed (29:30):

Yeah, it does. And I’m going to break it down even further that, so what you’re essentially saying is you chucking a bunch of money into a whole life insurance policy and you’ll then borrowing against it. And what does that, what does that right cost to pull it out of an insurance policy?

Russ (29:43):

So from every insurance company, a little different I don’t know this is going to probably shock people, but own 21 different life insurance policies with six different companies. So I the, the cheapest one is at 4.4% right now. And the most expensive one is at 8% right now.

Reed (30:02):

That’s what they’re paying you. That’s what you have to pay them in order to get it right.

Russ (30:05):

If I took a loan from them, that’s the going rate right now.

Reed (30:08):

Got it. Okay. And then what are they paying on the money in the policy? Because this is what, this is where the Delta comes in and where people need to understand the difference between it all. And then, then thus using the money to go off and cry at night or 9% pref on a, on an investment.

Russ (30:21):

So what they’re typically making somewhere between three to 5%, depending on know how long the policy has been in force. Right? I mean, it’s like starting up a new business when they first started for the first couple of years, they’re in the hole, like that example I gave the, they put in 800 K and had access to 650. Right. But it would take them probably three or four years to where they’re putting in cash in it. They’re getting dollar for dollar with they’re putting in it.

Reed (30:45):

Got it. Yeah. So, so just from a layman’s point of view, we putting in money, you’re borrowing it back at, let’s say 3% you may be earning four or 5% on that same money. So there’s a, there’s a Delta there, which is good. So it keeps growing the nest egg and correct me if I’m wrong. And then you’re taking that money and putting it into an 8% pref investment return. So you have a blended maybe nine to 10% return on the same money that you invest in the whole life insurance policy. Is that roughly what I’ve got? Is that correct?

Russ (31:13):

Yeah, it is. And I, you know, my, your brain is very similar to mine. Where, when you first hear this, you want to try to figure out where the Delta is, how the math works out. So you can ultimately see, is this the best? And I had to, it took me six months Reed to go through this because somebody had to prove it over and over because my predisposition to this subject matter was anti right. And so like somebody had a really over and over show them the calculators. But the beauty of this is what I have found. And it’s really for the last two or three years as Joey and I have seen this work is that the return that the man who wrote this book, he named it, as you said earlier, infinite banking. And it really becomes the returns are the unseen.

Russ (31:57):

I don’t know. There there’s a lot of economics books out there that talk about the seen and the unseen and what I’ve experienced personally, as I’ve created, you know, a lot of money in these insurance policies is not what the insurance policies ever did, right? I mean, there’s different companies. One may pay you for one pays you three, one pays you five. And of course, everybody wants to try to figure out the one that pays you five, but it’s really at the end of the day, that one to 2% is not the difference maker. The difference maker is when people get that aha moment that I now have access to cash. And I have a place that I now get to go tell it what to do. And they find guys like you, who are helping them see something that they’d never seen before. And then start looking around.

Russ (32:40):

An example, I love to give Reed is, you know, the, the part of, you know, when I was a little kid, you’re talking about little things and it was way you’ve made your first dollar. Well, I just remember as a kid, I got fascinated with the digital clock. When it said 1111 to this day, multiple times a week, I will see the clock say 11, 11. Now, do you know what the little function is in your brain that tells you that? It’s something called the reticular activating system. And for some people it’s when they, when they went and bought their car for the first time and they drove it off the lot and they realized their car was no longer as unique as they thought it was because they started seeing every other car around them. The same. It was the same one. Well, this way my brain is with 1111.

Russ (33:22):

I just think it’s interesting. So then I went like, right now, it’s 1244, my brain, doesn’t say every time it’s 1244, 1244. It just tells me, you know, it’s just the time of day, but when it’s 1111, and it just says, Hey, by the way, that’s important to you for whatever reason. Cause I thought it was important as a kid. Well, the reason that’s important to money is when people have stored cash in a place, they actually can access it. Then they start telling their brain, this is important. And what we have found is the amount of deal flow people actually do when they have access to cash is through the roof. So it doesn’t matter what the one or 2% Delta is on the money it’s access to cash. And there’s no other tool that I have found where people have actually experienced that sort of freedom, except through this mechanism.

Joey (34:07):

Another way I would say the same thing is the Delta is it’s important when it comes to the actual math in the policy. We don’t want to discount that. Like, I mean, that would be silly, but the Delta is way bigger on the education that our clients go through because what they’ve always been trained to do, and this is a programming that wall street does. We call it the wall street mindset. It’s out of sight. Out of mind. I don’t have to be engaged in growing my own wealth. So what happens? I set it up on a shelf and I go about doing my business. And I don’t think about how I’m either getting ahead or behind. I don’t have a report card other than I get this statement once every quarter, once every year, whatever. And I don’t have, I have my blinders on, right?

Joey (34:59):

So you, I mean, Robert Kiyosaki would say there’s million dollar deals that go into your nose every single day, but you don’t know to look for them. Well, when, when all of a sudden people take control of their finances and they’re no longer deferring money and life, they’re putting it into their control. One of our clients said it best. He says, now that I had access to cash, my education came at a premium because I had to tell my money what to go do. And so that’s why the podcast exists. That’s why our community exists is we’re surrounding people without those limiting beliefs, without the limited networks that we’ve all grown up with. Now, we’re surrounded by people that are thinking in a different way and pushing each other to get to freedom faster today. Not don’t, don’t defer that. Don’t be just satisfied with the status quo of sitting in my cubicle, as you mentioned for 40 years and wishing I was somewhere else, right. Let’s let’s really get after making the lives that we want. And so I think infinite banking that Delta comes in the form of education and we hear it every week from somebody else that we’ve been working with.

Reed (36:17):

Well, I think it’s super important to use it as a tool to go out and, you know, 10 X your growth in terms of the money you have available and putting it into different investment vehicles, not only just real estate, but the other vehicles that you mentioned out there before, like businesses like startups and online communities or their online ventures or E commerce. So it’s a really, really interesting, I guess what’s been the most unique way of making cashflow that you’ve seen through the community you’ve created.

Russ (36:47):

Whoa. that’s a, that’s a really loaded question. I will give you one. That is something that Joey and I are participating in that is by far really unique and it’s land flipping, raw land flipping. Have you ever heard of this before?

Reed (37:04):

Yes, I’ve had, I’ve had two lads on the show talk exactly like the land geek on talking about it. And I had another, another two gentlemen on talking about exactly that. Yeah.

Russ (37:12):

That, to me, it was like by far one of the most unique things that we, we are actually doing personally and seeing success.

Joey (37:20):

We just bought 20 parcels in Florida for about $2,500 a piece and turned around within two days and sold four of them for the equivalent of about 12,000 each. I mean, this is like absurd, the inefficiency of land. If you will, like that market, you can really take advantage of you know, finding that Delta so much easier and then creating cashflow from owner financing it back. That’s that’s been extraordinary. And one of our clients actually, it’s not super unique, but he’s probably one out of one or two probably out of the whole community that has done that. So that’s been pretty cool.

Reed (38:04):

Awesome. So let’s begin to the end of the show before we get into the top five investing tips, what’s the future hold for rest of 2020 and the online community?

Russ (38:13):

Man. There’s so much opportunity right now Reed. I mean, there’s so many people that are seeking a different way, right? I mean, thankfully the beauty of such a horrific start to this year is that people had a chance. I feel like to press the reset button to some degree, evaluate, and I think it’s created more

Russ (38:36):

Education and learning. So I think you’re going to get exposed more in what you do. What we’re doing is getting exposed to people because podcasts now, you know, people were like, wait a second. There’s I got to do more than watch jeopardy, you know, and every rerun of that, I can’t, you know, no sports to watch the tiger King’s gone. I can’t watch that anymore. So like they’re, they’re looking for other opportunities. And I think there’s, there’s amazing things when we see that yes, business isn’t efficient in different ways and entrepreneurship comes through the hardest of times and the, the way that we’ve seen business done in the past, just we’re seeing a lot of these businesses that, that, that should have gone away a long time ago. It’s funny. I was telling my daughters were listening to Joey now list out and just a ton of different businesses that filed bankruptcy.

Russ (39:24):

And one of my daughters was like, JC Penny’s like weren’t they bankrupt years ago, have they really been relevant? But just, there’s lots of, I think, opportunity that exists out there for people who now are seeking it. And one of the things that we’ve seen from the typical space is that this Cares Act as open up access to money and 401ks and IRAs to people that they didn’t want to, they wanted to get out, but they didn’t want to pay the penalty. And we interviewed some tax attorneys on our, on our podcast and they were sitting there talking about the different ways that people can get access to that money now this year, without not only penalty, but also being able to delay and spread the tax out over a three-year period of time. So that’s been a real blessing, I think, for a lot of people who, who wanted to maybe have a startup or wanted to invest in real estate or whatever, but had their money kind of in prison sitting inside their typical financial plan.

Reed (40:20):

Yeah. Well guys, I think you have got a huge future ahead of you. And I think 2020 is going to be the birth of some incredible investment opportunities. And I know that your platform will be at the forefront to teach them exactly what to do once they come around. Right. So, but when we do come to the end of the show, we’d like to dive into the top five investing tips, you’re ready to get into it.

Reed (40:47):

Lads one individually, what’s your daily habits that you practice.

Russ (40:52):

So I have started something in the last six months where I am spending

Russ (40:57):

More time at home in the morning to try to invest in my kids and my marriage and my wife. And so that she doesn’t feel like she’s holding the whole bag. We have five little girls. And so imagine homeschool three of them now about to be four. So I don’t come in until 10. And that really gives me time to spend time with the Lord to do any sort of exercise and to really invest in educating, helping to educate the kids in the morning. And that just kind of takes a big load off of me to be able to focus when I’m here and you know, hopefully put out some good content with this guy. Yeah.

Joey (41:34):

I think it’s important for us to get active in some way, every single day in order to relieve the stresses because our minds sometimes can get concerned with work or with investing or whatever it is. And for me, yeah, it’s it’s daily exercise. I wake up, I go work out with a group of guys every single morning at 7:00 AM. And that kind of sets the precedent for, for the rest of the day.

Reed (41:59):

Love it. A lot of question. Number two is who is the most influential people in your career to date?

Joey (42:05):

Well, I would start this off. I mean, it’s easy for me because the man who had the most influence in my life was the man who wrote that book, Becoming Your Own Banker, Nelson Nash. We happened to be in his backyard here at Birmingham. I read that book. I was on the flight home after seeing him on a stage, talking about this concept. I was down in Orlando, Florida, and I’m flying home and I finished the book and I turn it over and it shows his address, Birmingham, Alabama, and that, that led to 10 years of us being able to really pick his brain and have a relationship

Joey (42:41):

And he, you know, he, he graduated last year and went to be with the Lord, but you know, for 10 years I had a chance to spend a lot of time with him and he influenced me in many ways. Yeah.

Russ (42:53):

I’d say the same thing. We have many lunches with Nelson had him here to meet our clients a number of times, and with the multitude of seminars here in Birmingham, he definitely had the biggest impact both professionally. And I think personally, just the way he lived his life and loved his family and the legacy he left.

Reed (43:13):

The question I’m afraid is what’s the most influential tool in your business that you use on a daily basis. And when I say tool, it could be a hardware like a journal or a phone, or it could be software, which is that you just can’t live without. What is it?

Joey (43:26):

I have to say to me it’s more of a concept or an idea that we picked up along the way. We read Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. And if you haven’t read that book, I don’t care what business you’re in. It, it really gave us a picture of what it’s like to build a brand. And that your brand is not about you. It’s about others, who you serve is the hero. And I think most brands get that backwards. I know we did at first is we were always trying to talk about what are we doing to make you successful? What, what value do we bring? And ultimately people want to know that they’re the hero and we’re just the guide. So we we’ve invested in you know, training on this. We’ve read the book, we use it on our podcast. It, any presentation we give, I mean, I feel like it’s just, it’s just all over our business. And it’s made probably one of the biggest impacts in the last several years.

Russ (44:33):

So I, I I’m really in time management and, so I’ve, you know, I’ve read so many different books on that one that comes to mind is No BS Time Management, but I try to follow a daily calendar. So I spend, you know, on Friday afternoon. So later on today, I’ll spend the, you know, an hour or two just evaluating. How did I do, am I, am I scheduled for this week? And then planning out next week, I break out my, my schedule into three primary areas and I try to evaluate, did I, that I hit those three areas? Did I spend time in that? Or did I get distracted doing something that really someone else could be doing?

Reed (45:06):

I love it. One, one two books I recommend to you both is Key Person of Influence by Dan Priestley, Australian author. He’s also written another book called 24 Assets. He talks a lot about influence becoming one, but also that we are as a key person of influence. You’re not, shouldn’t be in the spotlight, but you should be directing the spotlight to someone else. And that’s the really most important thing if you’re around the brand and how you build that and how you build a following. So a little bit of definitely pick up those books. Question number four is what has been the biggest failure in each of your careers and what’d you learn from that failure?

Russ (45:42):

Yeah, man, where do I start

Reed (45:49):

Do it in one sentence. Okay.

Russ (45:52):

And this was to be lightning round, right? I would go back to early on the biggest failure I would say for me, was spending two years to become a certified financial planner.

Reed (46:05):

What’d you learn from that? What was the takeaway?

Russ (46:08):

My takeaway is learned from people who are actually doing things, not teaching things. And so for me, when we were interviewing people, the first thing we asked you know, before the interview starts is like, how are you? How is this impacting your life? Whatever they’re teaching us. And what I find is that there are people who are actually doing what they say they’re doing and it’s impacting their lives. And they’re just teaching because they want to go back into the dark and bring people to the light. What I found is through the CFP training, it was a lot of people teaching that had never experienced it. They’d written books and subject matter, that was irrelevant. You know, it, it, it was out of date when they wrote it 20 years prior. And so people really want to learn how to be financially successful.

Russ (46:52):

They need to go learn from people who are financially successful. And that to me was a big lesson.

Joey (46:58):

I think for me, I was in the mortgage industry for 11 years. And in that timeframe, I don’t think it’s necessarily unique to me, but I got caught up in the idea that the more I would work, the more fulfillment that would bring in terms of, you know, let’s say raises or income increases or whatever like this. And gratefully, I think the Lord kind of brought me out of that whenever I came to Russ and I was like, man, I really feel passionate about what we’re

Joey (47:30):

Teaching here. What’s, you’re teaching. I want to, I want to be doing this with you. I went home to my wife and this is after probably, I don’t know how many years of 60 plus hour work weeks and stressful weekends and nights, and not being able to go on vacation without my phone, just completely, you know, in my hand all the time and went back to her and I said, Hey, you know, you know, at the time I was making well over $300,000 a year and she didn’t work. So I was kind of nervous to tell her, Hey, I think the Lord is telling me, we need to start this business from scratch. And, you know, she was pregnant with our fourth daughter and she looked at me. She said, I think you should do it. And, and I said, what, how, where did, where did you do with my wife? But the reality was I had really lost focus. I was focusing on the wrong things and not seeking freedom for time and being present with my family. And I think as entrepreneurs, we struggle with that naturally, but it’s been a lot easier to do since making this transition.

Reed (48:36):

I think you bring up a whole different episode that we could do of, of, of understanding balance across. And you talk about pillars of wealth, but pillars within your own life and business just happens to be one of those pillars. So I’m a whole other story that I wanted to get your boys back on to chat about. Last question is where can people reach you to continue the conversation they want to be in your sphere? They want to find out what you do, where do they go?

Joey (48:58):

Yeah. So go to wealthaboutwallstreet.com/investingintheus

Joey (49:11):

And that’s going to give you free access actually to our community, where we have built as many tools as possible for people who are looking for ways to take control or looking ways to create a course. And they were looking for ways to create a life outside of work. That is where they’re not trading time for money. And we we’ve built a really, a super network in there. Amazing. You’re going to be in there really soon, Reed and sharing. And I just think that this is a great place for people who are looking for community, look for somebody to push them, to get further than where they are. Yeah. It’s a place for education. It’s a place for getting rid of those limiting beliefs, getting rid of the limits on your network. Again, those are the things I feel like are holding us back and the community kinda has brought it all into one roof and you can actually get it on your phone. So it’s super easy an app you can find the app store. So anyway we’d love to, to network with you guys and meet you in the app.

Reed (50:14):

Awesome. Awesome. Well, boys, I want to thank you for dropping by today. I just want to quickly reflect some of the things that I took away from today’s show. I’ve written a bunch of notes down here is a couple of top two or three things that I took away was money in motion. Think it’s so important and through different vehicles, like the whole term life policy insurance insurance policy that you can use to keep keeping that money in motion all the time to creating that long-term wealth. I think a super important mindset, and this is cliche, but mindset and education, and the fact that you boys are leading with it and, and helping create a community in and around you educating others to be successful and bring them out of the tunnel, as you said before and into the light. So I think that a couple of things that I took away from today’s show didn’t leave anything out.

Speaker 6 (50:57):

No, this is great. Thank you so much Reed for having us on. Real pleasure.

Reed (51:02):

Well, thank you very much, LEDs enjoy the rest of your week and we’ll catch up very, very soon. Well, they have another cracking episode jam pack with some incredible advice from Joey and Russ. If you do want to get into this fear, make sure you head over to the website and check them out because they are jam packed with some incredible information and education on their platform about creating the different five pillars to wealth and being around other people who are urging and, you know, just wanting to find out more about creating passive income through different ways outside of wall street. If you do like this show, please give us a review on iTunes. I want to thank you all again for taking some time to grow your financial IQ. You all again next week. So remember be bold, be bright go to the light.