Transcription

• Speaker #0

  The way I look at it is when you think about finances, most people are not even in the ball game. They're not even in the stadium, when you think about it as a baseball analogy. They are walking around out of the streets lost. I think a lot of people chasing wealth take on too much risk. You know, like 2008, 2009, how many people lost everything? I mean, I had guys that said they had 80 properties, lost every single one of them, and had to rebuild. And they've done a good job, because once you've done it once, you can do it again. The problem is... You know, 80% of Americans are not wealth minded, so they won't pick up my book. In fact, I've actually had some people tell me, I don't want to be a millionaire.

• Speaker #1

  We were in negotiations, investing in real estate. They're winning. They're making money.

• Speaker #2

  What's up, everyone? Welcome to the Real Estate Educators Podcast, where we provide the education you can build on. I am your host, Kevin Amos. We are back. We're having so much fun with this podcast. We're helping real estate investors and real estate educators. Are you out there building a portfolio? Are you trying to educate other investors. helping them out. This is the podcast for you. Got a super cool special guest, a little different than what we have had on the show before. So Terry Bradshaw, you've been doing this for a little while. You've been a real estate investor for 11 years, but we were just talking before we hit record about some of the mistakes you've made. So I definitely want to dig into that. You're an author of two books, third one's coming out and the host of two amazing podcasts. Welcome to the show.

• Speaker #0

  Hey, Kevin, thanks for helping me out. Let me come on your show. I really appreciate that.

• Speaker #2

  All right, man. Welcome to the show. I'm excited to get to know you a little bit, but then I really want to get into your podcast, your coaching. I didn't mention that in the intro there. I know you're doing some business and money and life coaching. So I want to get into that. And then your books that you've written, because I think that's, especially the 31 day one, that's really cool concept that you've come up with. So let's get into it. Take me back 2015. You bought a piece of property and you got into real estate investing. So take me back to that.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, so I worked for Dave Ramsey for 15 years, and I drank the Dave Ramsey Kool-Aid. Very hardcore on that. So actually, my wife, best advice I ever got about money I took from my wife, but I totally negated it. And she told me to buy Apple stock in like 1998. And I thought, who does she know? She doesn't know anything. And so I did not buy. Apple was about $3 a share back then and would have been worth millions. $3,000 would have made me a multimillionaire by now. But I didn't listen to her. And when I went to work for Dave, I told her, I said, hey, we're not going to invest in stocks anymore. We're just doing mutual funds. That's what we teach. That's what we're doing. So we just switched to mutual funds. And I really turned my learning brain off for about 15 years, you know, because I didn't really learn anything new while I worked for Dave around money. You know, Dave's stuff's very good about teaching the basics, you know, get people in the game of finance. It's not really good when you need to graduate and build real wealth. And so that's kind of what I learned. So but I was hardcore into that model, very debt free, you know, paid off, had a low house note in early days, five hundred dollars, sold that house, should have kept it. Second house I had paid off, didn't want to carry any debt forward, sold that house, put it towards my new house, should have kept it, could have rented it. So, you know, I think in 2015, I know I needed to move past mutual funds only, you know, 401ks and mutual funds. And so, you know, real estate was that path, you know, real estate has been more millionaires made with real estate than any other, you know, wealth building opportunity. So that's what I started to do. And I like spreadsheets. I sat down, put my little wealth, real estate investment spreadsheet together. And originally I was actually going to start buying like hundred fifty thousand dollar properties around Nashville, Tennessee. And what I ended up doing was actually buying beachfront homes. And so I decided to do, you know. short-term rentals instead of long-term rentals. My original plan was to buy long-term rentals at the $150,000, $200,000 price point and just pay cash for them. Buy two a year, pay cash, have them fully paid off because I was a Dave Ramsey guy. I was like, no debt. And so instead of doing that, what I ended up doing, my income had gone up quite a bit while I worked there. And so I ended up looking at Beachfront and our first property was a $600,000 thousand dollar home. We furnished it with about $50,000 in, you know, nice, nice stuff. So we had it nicely furnished and started renting that thing as a, you know, beach resort rental property, made some pretty good money the first year, second year, you know, third year COVID hit, didn't really make money that year. And yeah, and so, but we had it paid off. So we had really no risk. There really wasn't much risk in the property itself, which is a good thing. But, But, you know, looking back. If I could go back and do it differently, what I would probably do is instead of buying one property, I would have bought two and paid half down on both properties. That way I lowered my risk. Instead of high leverage, 80%, 90% leverage, I would have leveraged half and then lowered the note and then used the income to service that debt. And then aggressively paid off the debt. That's what I would have done. I think my model is a little bit more conservative than, say, an aggressive real estate guy. I know people that have 70 properties that are leveraged. And I don't necessarily agree with that model myself. But I'm at a point of rebuilding. So we bought one property in 2015, paid $650,000 cash for that thing. And then the next year. We did another one, but we bought a smaller place. We bought more of a townhome, and it was a $420,000 property. So we had two properties in the same community. It's called Prominence, the hub area, and that's down on a place called 30A, which is a really hot spot for investment properties. It's a hot spot for vacationers. And so we hit a nice place. We were in a really good zone. you know and the one thing i didn't realize is the weathering on the houses so you know we only had the thing for about five years and when you look at the house uh the way the wear and tear on the outside of the house the the structure itself it's like wow this is not a good environment you have to do a lot of maintenance and upkeep on beachfront properties that i didn't really understand at the time so you know you live and you learn but we were working with a great lady. I think it was Anne... Oh, I forget her name. Panhandle Getaways, they managed 500, 600 beachfront homes at the time. They did a great job by us. They had great rates. I think they were at about 15%, maybe 20% a month or something, or 20% of the rental, which was really good. There's a lot of people down there charging 20%, 30% for vacation home rentals, and they were a little bit less on the price. It worked out really well for us. I didn't make much on the townhome, Kevin. We pretty much broke even on that one. I sold that one first because we needed some capital. And then I waited a year or two to sell the other one. And the interesting thing, we looked at selling that second property in October. I forget what year it was. It might have been 21, I think. And they priced it around $800,000, and we waited about five months. And I got $1.2 million for the property. uh just over a five month period yeah waiting yeah it's just how fast crazy that was going up in price so we sold the second one for about 1.2 so on those two properties over a period of five years we made uh probably close to a million right around a million bucks on those two properties uh some of it through rental some of it through appreciation and uh so i didn't do too bad you know i'm not a i'm not a real estate mogul by any means but you know my first time out of the on a real estate property, I think I did pretty well.

• Speaker #2

  Okay. So on that townhome, you needed some cash. You had to free that up. So you chose to sell it instead of refinance to pull some cash out. Obviously, this is your aversion to debt.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. Or just not knowing. I just didn't know anything different. So I was very basic, very simple. Saying what you said right now is pulling cash out. That probably would have been a better option for me. Well, I was going to ask you,

• Speaker #2

  what happened to the value of that? If your other one went up four or 500 grand, what did the townhome do in that same amount of time?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, I didn't look back at that because I didn't want to have that pain. You don't want to do that. Don't do that. Yeah, I've moved on. But yeah, I mean, knowing what I know now, I've just learned so much, man, because you've got to remember, from 2001 to 2016, I didn't really grow as a financial guy. I was heads down, 401ks, mutual funds. That's what Dave taught. I didn't learn anything else. I didn't learn anything about money while I worked for Dave Ramsey. Everything I knew before then, I would say actually regressed because I was actually doing swing trading on stocks before I went to work for Dave. And I was making 60%, 90% every six to nine months on the stocks I was investing in. I only made one bad investment, and I just broke even on it. That was my bad investment. Everything else I made money on. And so I was doing pretty well with swing trading. And then because I went to work for Dave, I shut that down.

• Speaker #2

  What is swing trading? Swing trading.

• Speaker #0

  So... Day trading is when you are in and out of the market in the same day. Swing trading is when you're in and out of a stock within a year. You're watching the movement of the market. You're going to get in. You're going to get out. You're going to make some profit. Then if you're in longer than that, that's long-term trading. That would be over a year. That would be more your buy and hold. Buy and hold really is like, think I'm going to buy and hold this stuff until I'm 65 years old. Or you're going to hold it for longer than a year. So swing trading, you're going to watch the market. You're going to understand the market. You're going to look at trends in the market. So what I had been doing was watching tech stocks because I had a high affinity for technology. And I was looking at Cirx stocks and AMD stocks and Intel stocks. And I was trading those three stocks every six to nine months because they were all one-upping each other in the chip market. And so I would buy the stock when their stock was down. waiting for it to go up when their new chip came up because that's what would happen the chip would come out things would get hot all of a sudden all the computer manufacturers were running that new chip because it was the fastest computer and then um i would watch their stock double and then i would sell it so that's basically what i was doing it sounds so easy tony but that it's it's not is it no it's not you know i was just hit the sweet spot and understood it but you know what i learned at that time is you need to watch you need to have knowledge right you need to study And so you've got to watch the market trends. You've got to watch the industry. And the thing that burned me when I made my bad investment, I actually bought a stock called Iomega, and I believe they're still around. And I bought that stock at about $7. It went to $14, and I sold it. So I made my money, but then it kept going up and I got back in and I got greedy. I got greedy. And so it went up a little bit more to like, I think maybe 17 and then it started dropping. So, you know, the money that I made was still there, but I didn't get away on that one clean. So and so what I learned about that is I did not look at leadership on that stock. So that's not something I had learned to look at when I invested in stocks. And so, and what I learned was that that company had been through like four CEOs over a very short period of time. The chairman of the board, which was the primary owner in the stock, was apparently, you know, either bad at hiring people or something. But they made some missteps when they had a real opportunity, I think, to hit the market hard. And I don't know exactly what decisions they made, but that was the one that I attributed to, is I just did not learn to look at what leadership of the company was in place. and their history and their traction. And that was a life-learning lesson I had to pay for. But yeah, that's what I was doing in the stock market, Kevin. And then real estate, like you were saying, I didn't pull money out because I didn't know that. I didn't learn anything new while I worked for Dave as far as money goes. I learned a lot about business, but I didn't learn anything new about money because his stuff is pretty simple. It's seven baby steps. It's for the average person to kind of get going with finances. Knowing what I know now, Kevin, since doing my podcast, my Millionaire Choice podcast, I've interviewed 151 millionaires now. And so that's where I've done my bulk of my financial learning is through all these guests I've had on that show and just all the different things that they do to make money. And it's pretty amazing when you think about how many paths there are to build wealth.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, and so I don't know Dave Ramsey personally, obviously. I don't know him, his stuff that well, other than it. totally contradicts like a Robert Kiyosaki, like those two go head to head. Right. And I'm such a fan of Robert and I owe so much of my success to what I've learned in his book. So I've, I've chosen not to spend a lot of time on the Dave Ramsey stuff. So because of that, maybe you could help me. What is like, what's the primary lesson somebody would learn if they were interested in following Dave?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. So the way I talk to Dave, I think about Dave. Now you got to understand, Dave makes $300,000 in... over $300 million a year right now in his business. So he's a fantastic business guy, right? He's been teaching the same seven baby steps for over 30 years. So think about that. No changes. No changes. Yeah, because it's tried and true. So when you think about, the way I look at it is when you think about finances, most people are not even in the ballgame. They're not even in the stadium when you think about it as a baseball analogy. They are walking around out of the streets lost. They're not doing anything with their finances. I mean, that's probably like 80% of the people in the country right now.

• Speaker #2

  Because they don't teach it in school, Tony. That's the problem.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, and we could talk about that all day long too, right? So he teaches the basics, and I think that's what God gave him to do. He was supposed to get people in the game of finance, and he is the best in the world at that task. The other things that he teaches, Kevin, is he's going to teach you how to save a little bit of money. to put some money in your account so you can pay your bills and crap, he is going to get you on a budget. That is a primary indicator. They call it every dollar, give every dollar a name where it needs to go. So you're going to take your money. You're going to have a plan for that money on where it's going to get spent, what it's going to go do. And then it's invest 15% in retirement. So it's a very basic structure that's very predictable. It's very repeatable. It gets you moving in the right direction, and you will accumulate some wealth. Like if you think about people that don't have a plan, 10 years from now, they're still not going to have a plan. They're still going to be broke. They're still not going to be paying their bills well. If you get on a Dave Ramsey plan, you will have a decent amount of money in 10 years. Like you will have money saved. You won't be struggling. And so what I call that is just getting by. So I have a teaching that I teach called the four money buckets. And the first bucket is the broke bucket. You're just not paying your bills. You're broke, man. You just cannot get by. You're living off credit cards. You're struggling, right? That's the broke bucket. The next bucket is the just getting by bucket where you feel comfortable because you can pay your bills. And that's the trap is that you're doing something better, but you're still not in a great place yet, right? The third bucket is the future millionaire bucket. And so that's where you actually have wealth consciousness you're aware of wealth You're mentally moving. You've made a mindset shift to go, hey, I'm going to be a future millionaire. I am building wealth. I am making the decisions. I am moving in the right direction, right? And you might be a starter in that zone, but you're at least in it. And then you've got the millionaire bucket. And that's when you've hit the millionaire milestone. Now, some people say, hey, what about the multimillionaire? What about the billionaire bucket? And I'm like, yeah, those are there, but that's not where the vast majority of people are. So the millionaire milestone, like I became a millionaire when I was 40. That really is just a milestone. It's like you can't really get people to think past that if they're not there yet, right? So once you hit that millionaire milestone, your mindset opens up a little bit more. You start to shift. And you start to dream a little bit differently. But until you hit that point, you're really, you know, you're just kind of like learning. You're like baby steps, right? You're kind of moving towards millionaire status. Then when you hit it, you know, things shift for you.

• Speaker #2

  Cool. So now you've interviewed all of these millionaires. You're one yourself. What have you learned from that process that you were missing with the Dave Ramsey's lessons?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, I think risk management is probably one of the biggest things is understanding risk, how to leverage risk, how to service risk. where to take the risk, where not to take the risk. I think a lot of people chasing wealth take on too much risk. 2008, 2009, how many people lost everything? I mean, I had guys that said they had 80 properties, lost every single one of them, and had to rebuild. And they've done a good job because once you've done it once, you can do it again. People had eight properties, lost all eight properties. Why is that? Because they didn't understand the risk. They didn't understand what they were handling. And so they were kind of like in the intro zone to building wealth. So I think that's a big one. I think I understand risk a lot better right now than I did back then. And so risk, especially when it comes to real estate and properties, things like that, the appreciation, what goes into it. I think understanding risk when it comes to like cryptocurrency is a big one. You know, risk, when you look at what cryptocurrency has done over the last 15 years. You know, what I tell people is the last time you should have had a financial advisor that didn't tell you to put some money into crypto should have been about 2017. Because when Bitcoin hit $20,000, that should have been on everybody's radar because of what it did. You know, it was like, I think, $3 in 2011, maybe $6 in 2011. But to go from that to $20,000 in 2017 and you're still not paying attention to it. That's a big deal. And I think that's where you've got a bunch of financial advisors that are kind of stuck in old systems. And they don't really realize what's going on in the financial markets right now. And they don't understand where the dollar is headed. They don't understand that cryptocurrency is a replacement for the U.S. dollar. At some point in the future, that will happen. I think it's going to be probably like 2031 or 2033. There's a lot of people that think it's going to happen like this year or next year. I don't believe that. I believe we've got a bit more time with the U.S. dollar. But when I look at what the bankers are doing and the U.S. government's doing with the debt crisis, every fiat currency, Kevin, has failed in history, every single one. The U.S. dollar will fail. It will fail at some point in the future. I think it's going to be relatively soon, but not by 2031. I think we'll see some financial shifts in 2029 2030 and 2031 so you know when you talk about risk like we were saying for understanding risk that's part of it is like the risk of the u.s dollar where is it um i think one of the numbers i saw kevin was that uh people uh countries used to hold i think it was like u.s treasuries i think it was like 60 or 70 percent of like holdings worldwide were like in u.s treasuries that numbers actually dropped down to like 50 percent so just that trend alone It's a big tell of what's ahead and what's coming.

• Speaker #2

  I think it's lower than that, Tony. Yeah, is it now? I saw a graph. It's rather scary, and it's trending in the same direction. But there was a point where gold was the primary reserve. And then over time, treasuries took over because the dollar was so strong. And so for 30 years or 40 years or somewhere around that, U.S. debt was more than gold. Well, within the last year, that switched back. So now foreign countries are holding more gold than they are U.S. debt again. And the trend is that's starting to widen. So to say 50%, I haven't seen what you're referring to here, but to say 50% of reserves is held in U.S. debt, I think it's lower. I really believe it's lower than that.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. Well, wherever it's going to head lower, if it's not lower, it's heading lower.

• Speaker #2

  And it's definitely heading lower. And, you know, it's part of that. It's not, I don't want to get off on this tangent here because I want to hear about your books and your podcast. But, you know, when you have sanctions, you put a sanction on a company and you lock up their capital, they can't get it back. Why would they invest in your debt? Right? So we think we're doing a good thing by doing a sanction and then all of a sudden it backfires. Yeah. We'll see. This episode is brought to you by Pine Financial Group. Pine Financial is a private lender Specializing in short. term rehab lending to real estate investors. Got a property that needs some love? We can help. We are able to offer funding solutions because we raise private money from individual investors. With more than 15 years of experience, Pine offers passive investors an alternative that provides stability, consistency, and security to your portfolio. If you like real estate but want to avoid the ups and downs and effort, a Pine Mortgage Fund could be a perfect fit for you. Accredited investors will experience an 8% preferred return and profit sharing. Diversify your portfolio out of Wall Street and into Main Street with a Pine Financial Group fund. To get more information at pinefinancialgroup.com, that's pinefinancialgroup.com.

• Speaker #0

  Well, I'm a little bit different opinion on some of that stuff. Yeah, the sanctions, that is not a government thing. That is a banker control thing. Most of the countries you see that happen to. is because they've gone off of the U.S. dollar debt system. So when you look at what's going on in Iran, Iran doesn't have a central bank. They're one of the few countries in the world that do not have a central bank that's tied to the global banking system. Not the U.S. banking system, but the global international monetary fund banking system. Iran, South Korea is one of the, I'm sorry, North Korea. I think Russia kicked their central bankers out. So when you see that, that's what you're... That's kind of what you're seeing and this trend away from that. So the monetary system is a bullying tactic that's used against other countries. And so but what you're seeing is the risk. That's what we were talking about is the understanding of that risk in those markets. So like right now, Kevin, a lot of people are holding their entire retirement life savings is held in the stock market, the 401Ks and IRAs. That's a bad move. And even if you're in a mutual fund, which is what Dave teaches, hey, invest in mutual funds because they're diversified. Well, they're still within the same market. They're still within the same equities. So you're not really you're diversified across businesses, but you're not diversified across assets. And that's a really big deal. So one of the things I teach is there's only three forms of real wealth, and that is land and real estate, gold and silver, and businesses that produce a good or service. So those are the three forms of real wealth. When you look at the stock market, I'm a big believer that it's a big Ponzi scheme. So you can make money in the stock market. You can build money in the stock market. But the stock market's been down for 50 of the last 100 years. And if you were alive and maybe 50 years old when the stock market took its dump in the 1920s and the 1970s, there's a good chance you were dead before it recovered. So it's not a safe asset, and I believe it's somewhat manipulated. for opportunity. I've actually seen a chart, which I can send you, that was made in, I think it was 1890s, 1892. And it was a cyclic history of where the stock market would go from highs and lows. And it has been like 100% accurate. So over the timeframes.

• Speaker #2

  So you're suggesting that the stock market's overvalued?

• Speaker #0

  Right now? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. 100%. Yeah, it is. And there's actually some laws. about that.

• Speaker #2

  Help our listener out here. What do we do about that?

• Speaker #0

  Well, what I I can't really give advice here, but what I can tell you is what I do is I'm not in the stock market right now. I'm in private Not at all. I'm in a private equity investment. So when I look at where to invest, I'm going to buy localized businesses. I'm going to invest in localized businesses that are small businesses that have opportunity, that are not on the market, that are off the market. That's what I'm personally going to look at right now. And then I'm going to look at real estate, you know, and I'm going to look at gold and silver. When you look at gold and silver since 1972, I think when Nixon took us off the gold standard, gold's gone up 10,000 percent, like over 10,000 percent. Like it's beat the market, right? Now, it hasn't beat Tesla. It hasn't beat Apple, but it has beat the market as a whole. And, you know, silver is the same way. So those are hard assets that are goods, and that's because of the decline of the U.S. dollar and the inflation, right? So it's not that gold and silver have actually gone up in value. It's that the dollar has gone down in value, and those assets have gone up. Here and where I live, man, the average house is a million bucks a year. I mean, I'm sorry, a million dollars. And when I bought houses, they were like $60,000. back in the 1998. So that house now is up to $500,000, that particular house is. The house I'm in now is about $1.6, $1.7 million. But when we bought it, we bought it for $550,000, and we bought it in 2009. So when you look at those assets, I'm looking at hard assets. And I don't tell people, or I don't look at, you don't have to get out of the market, like the entire market, but don't hold everything in the market. Right. So, you know, if I had if I had a million bucks in the market right now, I'd probably pull half and then put it into another asset like real estate. I would find a way to move it into real estate. So and that's something people don't understand is that they have an IRA that they can actually leverage it into different types of assets. You can do what's called a self-directed Roth IRA or self-directed IRA, and you can get access to lots of different investment opportunities. And not just be locked into the stock market. And I think that's a very wise thing to do is to diversify some of those assets so that you don't have them all at risk in a market that's ripe for a fall.

• Speaker #2

  I totally agree with you, Tony. We operate a real estate debt fund. That's what we do as our business. And so I totally agree with you. The stock market is so hard to predict. Even your swing, I think you call it, the swing investing. Even if you're really good, you still lose sometimes, right? Investing in real estate or real estate debt is just so consistent. Now, you're not going to hit the 90% returns like you were hitting, but if you're at a 9% or 10% and it's very consistent and there's some tax advantages, that's not so bad.

• Speaker #0

  Well, I think that's the big thing too, Kevin. You brought up taxes. I didn't understand how powerful real estate was for tax advantages, right? When you do, what's it called? Cost segmentation. Is that what it is?

• Speaker #2

  Segregation.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, segregation. Yeah, I didn't understand that, right? And so I still don't understand it. I know about it, but I haven't learned it yet, so I can't apply it. I have to go to an expert to look at that. But how you can bury wealth. So when I look at my days at Dave Ramsey, I was making over a million bucks a year. The last three or four years I worked at Dave's. But I didn't understand I could just go bury my taxes in a cost seg. I could have been paying zero taxes with buying that money, but instead I'm paying $500,000 or more in taxes a year. when I could have gone and buried that because I didn't learn anything new under the Dave Ramsey model. And so nothing against Dave because what he's doing is amazing. He's helping millions of people. But you've got to graduate. You've got to go to level two, right? And so that's the main thing that I learned while I was after I got out. I didn't know that while I was there. It wasn't until I, again, did my show that I started learning all these new things and then all these different wealth-building tools that are available to us. And how I coined this phrase. I actually have a community, Kevin, that I'd like to pitch if I can. Yeah, feel free.

• Speaker #2

  I want to get into that, by the way. I want to get into that and your coaching, and then let's talk about your podcast. Yeah,

• Speaker #0

  so I have this community. So I actually have three brands, four brands that I use with the money stuff. This is what I learned is the Millionaire Choice book I have is a great book. It's very good for people that are wealth-minded. But the problem is 80% of Americans are not wealth-minded. So they won't pick up my book. In fact, I've actually had some people tell me, I don't want to be a millionaire. And I'm like, well, then you want to be broke because a million dollars is not a lot of money. So I had to create some new brands. One of them is called Get Money Smart. So if you want to be good with money, you have to learn how money really works. And so that Get Money Smart brand allows me to talk to the masses because they go, yeah, I need to learn something about money. I wish they would have taught me this in school. So that brand works really well with people. Then we have another brand called Purpose of Wealth, which allows me to talk to church people, because church people, for whatever reason, have a mental block against even talking about money or wealth. And so when you talk about purpose, though, they listen. And so those three brands allow me to hit across the board on pretty much any psychology that people have about money. But the Get Money Smart brand, we actually created a community about three months ago, and we're actively working on that. And it is called the Get Money Smart Community. It's hosted on a school platform. That's S-K-O-O-L dot com. But if somebody wanted to find out about that, they can go click a link and we'll get them in for free. We're bringing in free memberships right now. We just want to load this thing up with free people to be free for life. But we've got courses, discussion groups, meeting groups around that. And it is around this concept about teaching people about money. Now, you mentioned earlier that we don't learn it in school. Right. So how how hard is it to figure out that we should be teaching first graders about money and then second graders about money? Third graders, fourth graders. It's not real hard. Right. You're not considering talk about it. Like, man, it'd be great if we had 12 years of financial education. What do they do right now to give you one semester? And that's because somebody pushed for it. And you and I both know one semester of financial education is is basically a waste. It's it's not valuable at all. So. So then you have to ask the question, if you and I could figure this out on a podcast, shouldn't our government officials or bankers figure out that we should be doing 12 years financial education? Right?

• Speaker #1

  I mean I'm glad to hear that you're telling me a semester. That is just coming to our school district next year. They're just now figuring that out. So I think you have to have a finance a personal finance class to graduate high school. Like that is amazing. Where has this been?

• Speaker #0

  Right? Well, here's the reality. If you have a group of people, citizens, Americans, 340 million of us that all understand money and all understand wealth, what do you think the country looks like? What do you think the world looks like?

• Speaker #1

  Well, I could tell you what I think. I think that they're going to be investing in their 401ks and their IRAs and all the stuff that Dave Ramsey talks about, and it's going to help our GDP and our output.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, but they don't want that.

• Speaker #1

  U.S. companies will grow.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, they don't want that because people I don't think they think that will happen.

• Speaker #1

  What I think well, go ahead.

• Speaker #0

  Well, here's what I'll tell you is that wealthy people are not controllable. That's the bottom line. If you have a nation full of people who understand money and how to build wealth, they're not controllable. They're not in debt. They're not leveraged. They're not buying cars at 20% or 15% interest. They're not running credit cards at 17%, 20%, 30% interest. You know, they're not doing that stuff, right? So they're avoiding that. So then the bankers lose power. And if the bankers lose power, the government loses power. That's the reality of the whole picture, because you don't have a central banking system where the money gets created when we sign our name for the debt. That's when the money's really created, is when we put our name on a dotted line and say, hey, we're going to pay on this money that doesn't exist. We're going to borrow money that doesn't exist, and we're going to pay interest back to you. so that you as a bank have more power and more wealth. That's really what we're doing because the money doesn't even exist. It's all fake. The whole financial system is essentially fake. That's why I say the stock market's a Ponzi scheme because the money doesn't exist. If everybody starts selling their stock, where do you think the stock market goes? It goes to zero. It goes to zero because the money doesn't exist. That's why for the really rich guys, they have the shorts. Because those guys are draining the system. They're the ones pulling the money out because they're shorting the stock. So we're putting money in. They pull money out. Now, the interesting thing, this is just a sidebar. We don't have to talk about it long. You've got this AI system now where these people are developing AI. I've got a few buddies that have developed AI to do their trading for them. They do high-frequency trading. So they're placing 50 trades a day in the stock market. They're in and out same day. They're making 4% a month. That's just what they're paying out. They're actually making more than that, up to 10% a month, but they're only paying out 4% to the investors, right? So when those systems pop up, like have you ever heard of what was the name? The junk bond king? What was his name? I'm trying to remember. He had developed a monetary model or a financial model that allowed him to win in the stock market like really, really well. And so they came after him, labeled him as the junk bond king, and then threw him in prison. Right?

• Speaker #1

  No, I didn't know that.

• Speaker #0

  Oh, yeah. And then they threw him in prison and then they stole his system and started using it. So because he built a system that actually beat the market, they didn't want him doing that. So whenever you come up with a system that beats the market, it gets crushed. It gets brought down. So they'll find some way to attack it or take it or something like that. So you have to be very careful. But the AI models now are actually able to beat the markets pretty consistently. and do this high-frequency trading just like my friends have got this system that they use. But if that ever gets big on the radar and starts getting traction and people start learning about it, they'll come shut it down because they don't want people to win at that level. And it's just not quote-unquote allowed, so to speak, when you watch it. But yeah, Junkbond King, Michael Milken. That was his name, Michael Milken, Junkbond King. I think he was back in the 80s. I think that's when he hit the market. But he had developed a financial model that allowed him to invest in certain stocks a certain way, and he was actually able to beat the market pretty consistently and produce higher than average returns. But, yeah, the whole thing, it's really interesting when you start thinking about it. If everybody knew about money, like You would look at a very different country. When you've got, like, Grandma, and she's a multimillionaire, you think she's going to let little Johnny take out student loan debt for college? No, she's going to write the check, and little Johnny's going to go to college without any student loan debt, and no banks are going to make any money. So that's when you look at student loans and how much student loan debt. I think there's, like, over 5 million people in their 60s or older that are paying on student loan debt right now, and it's going to go up 5 to 10 million a year every decade.

• Speaker #1

  That's a whole other conversation we could have. My oldest just graduated high school, so we're getting ready to go into the college experience.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, I don't think student loan is a horrible thing. I think you've got to manage it. What I tell my kids is, hey, this specific moment, I'm not in a really good position to be able to help my kids that much with college. So what I try to do is say, hey, you've got to figure it out, but keep it to less than one year of salary once you get out of school. If you can keep it down to like $40,000 when you get out, then you're doing pretty good. If you go in there and you take out $200,000 in student loan debt, that's not the right model. It's not a good model. But if you can work one year, pay off your student loan, you're not doing too bad.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, Dave Ramsey would hate this, Tony. But my second house I bought, I used a student loan as my down payment because I had the military pay for my school. So I didn't need the student loan. But at 2% interest, I mean, come on.

• Speaker #0

  That you can't. Yeah, that's a that's another thing I miss is when those interest rates were down so low at three percent. I was so anti-debt. I mean, I should have been going by and everything I could have been by.

• Speaker #1

  Should have bought the two instead of the one.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  All right. I want to hear about your coaching program and then we got to wrap this up. I know we're running short on time here. Tony, tell us about what you're doing with with helping your students, your your coaching clients.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. So I think most business coaches, they coach you on your business. What I try to do is give a three dimensional look at your life. So I do business coaching, and then I bring in money and life. So a lot of business coaches will, like I said, focus on business. But the reality is most business owners are pouring their money right back into their business. They don't have an understanding of how to invest, and they really need to diversify off of that business because there's no guarantee that business is going to be around forever. But if you soak 15 years of your life into the business, the business goes belly up. You've got nothing to show for it. That's a terrible model. So I try to teach them how to invest. Then I get into the life concept to go, hey. You know, most of us as parents are, you know, we're first-generation parents. We're trying to figure it out. I've got six kids. I didn't make all the right calls in my life, but I've done pretty well. We've been married 28 years, six kids. They're all awesome kids, all just wonderful, well-adjusted kids, no problems whatsoever with any of our children. So I think I have something to offer there. You know, 50% of marriages end in divorce, and that's a terrible place. You know, the fast way to lose half your business, half your money, go through a divorce. It's just not pleasant. And fortunately, I avoided that. I got really, really close to the edge a little over a decade ago, but I was able to salvage it. And so my wife and I are doing pretty well right now. And it was not her. It was me. I was making all the wrong decisions, but decided I wanted to be in the game. So I got my head back in the game and started doing what I needed to do to get back on track. And, you know, it was just a conscious choice. But, yeah, that's what I do, man. So we do we look at the holistic side of the business. A lot of times you're going to get business coaches that don't have a lot of experience. I've been with Dave. We went from 3 million to 125 million. I ran 20% of the company, led strategy in the company. And so with a business, you need to start with strategy. You need to start with vision, where the thing's going. A lot of business owners get started, and they're just doing the next thing. It's just like, I got this idea. I want to go sell something. So they start a business, and that's great, but they don't really know where to take it when it hits above a certain level. So that's what I try to bring to the table for people is this holistic look at the business, dimensional. I do have a business checkup on my website, Kevin, and it's basically a 10-step assessment. It just looks at 10 dimensions of your business to give you a holistic view. So a lot of business owners are very hyper-focused on certain areas, and they don't see the big picture. So what I try to do is help them see the big picture, see where the holes are, and then go patch those holes up. But, yeah, I call it the higher peak coaching. So if you want to reach the next level, reach your highest peak.

• Speaker #1

  I think everyone should have a coach. I talk about this all the time. Everyone needs a coach. Michael Jordan had one, right? And one of the main reasons we want coaches is for the accountability piece, which you did not mention in your description there, but I'm sure that there's that. I think a byproduct or a side benefit of coaching is the education piece that you can get from it. And gosh, it sounds like running 20% of Dave Ramsey's organization, we could learn an awful lot from you. That's really cool that you decided to give back in that way. So thank you for that. What I'm going to do now, Tony, is go through my notes. I take notes when I have these episodes. Because I want to capture what I learned from it. And then I'll just go through that and hopefully the listener can get some value out of that. And then if you could just let me know if I'm missing anything or if there's something you want to add. And then one final piece of advice for the listener. Are you up for that?

• Speaker #0

  Sure, let's do it.

• Speaker #1

  All right. More millionaires are made with real estate. That's one of the very first things you said, which I found that interesting because later you said you were making 90% a year on your swing trading. But still, you said real estate is a great investment and more millionaires are made with that. You could have bought two properties instead of that one if you only understood leverage. So understanding leverage is a pretty important piece to being a real estate investor. We talked about the swing trading, and that sounds very difficult. You made it sound easy, but it sounds very difficult because there's a lot you need to understand. You even said one of the things I didn't understand is understanding the leadership team of the companies. Risk management is one of the basics. The thing that was most... impactful for you that you learned from all of those millionaires that you've interviewed. So building that foundation. Crypto is an important piece. You should add that to your portfolio if you don't have it because you're confident it's going to replace the dollar. I agree. I don't know which crypto is going to emerge as that. A lot of people think Bitcoin is the one. I'm not convinced yet. But either way, crypto is a great add to a portfolio. Diversify against multiple asset classes, not just the stock market. Land, gold, and business, that's how real wealth is built. Those three, I'll call them asset classes. That's my terms, not yours. But really want to focus in on hard assets. That's a great investment in this environment because we both agree that the stock market's overvalued. Dave is great, but you need to graduate. That's how I wrote that down. So learn the basics, fantastic. But then you got to take it to the next level. Listening to a podcast like this or your podcast where you interview people that have- actually done it is a great way to do that. And then we talked a little bit about getting money out of the business. We talk about that a lot on the show. It's very difficult for business owners to do that. It has to be a conscious decision to get money out of the business. So I love that you said that. And then finally we touched on conspiracies a little bit. So how did I do?

• Speaker #0

  I thought it was great, man. I never said, how do you wrap me up like that? But sounds like I actually know something.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, you did a great job. So anything to add to those notes? And if not, what's the final piece of advice for our listener?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, I think the biggest advice I give people, man, this is how I've built my whole life, is you just got to become better the next day than you were today. So, you know, read a book, watch a podcast, or listen to a podcast, watch a YouTube channel. There's so many assets that are available to us now to help us grow as individuals. And don't just grow about money, grow about one-dimensional, be multi-dimensional, you know. Watch some marriage videos, learn about marriage stuff, man. It's so important. 50% of marriages end in divorce. That's terrible. It doesn't have to be that way. You can raise good kids. I was very fortunate. My wife took me to a bunch of parenting classes very young, pre-birth. I mean, she had me in everything. And then we raised good kids. I have to give a lot of that credit to her. I was kind of like an absentee father for a while. I've been more engaged the last eight years. But prior to that, my wife took care of everything. And today, we're doing better as a team. And so I would just encourage people to do that. Just grow as an individual. Read, study, learn, get into some tribes. You know, if you want to get better with money, find a group of people that's trying to do better with money. And then get around them and then find a mentor. You know, find a mentor. Don't try to figure it out all on your own. I tried to figure it out all on my own because I was a DIY guy. But if I could go back, those are two of the things I would change. I would find a mentor and I would find a tribe and not do it alone.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, I think. Every single guest has said something very similar. It's the people around you that make the difference. That's so important. All right, man, how do we get a hold of you? How do we get to the view into our business, the 10 things that you had mentioned? How do we find that? And then how do we get a hold of you?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, so everything I do is at TonyBradshaw.com. You can find my podcast there. Right now, if you join my newsletter, you're going to get access to my three books that I have, The Millionaire Choice, 31 Days to Get Money Smart, and Creating Millionaire Families. which is a half-done book, but it's still good. The half that's there is actually good. So you'll get access to all three of those. You'll find the link to the community, so you can go to the community, give me your email address, and I will send an invite, personally send you an invite to join our community. We're taking free members for now. And then on the coaching side of my site, you'll find the checkup. So you'll just have to go to the business coaching page, and you can download it. I don't even think I require an email address. I think it's just a click, and you can get access to the coaching. check up.

• Speaker #1

  What's the site?

• Speaker #0

  Tony Bradshaw.com. Tony Bradshaw.com. Not Terry.

• Speaker #1

  Are you related to Terry by chance?

• Speaker #0

  Ah, but you know, maybe like six, six or eight generations ago, maybe somewhere in there.

• Speaker #1

  All right. Well, I know you're a super busy guy. You got a lot going on, a lot of investments that you're doing. You're helping a lot of people and you still chose to spend. We spent almost an hour here together. So I'm so grateful for that. Thank you, Tony.

• Speaker #0

  Thank you, Kevin. It's been a wonderful, wonderful podcast host.

• Speaker #1

  Thank you. And for the listener, you have other podcasts you could be listening to, but you chose the Real Estate Educators podcast. And for that, I'm so grateful. Thank you so much. If you got value like I did, five-star review, share it with a friend, and I hope you make this day a great one. I really hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. If you did, please be sure to follow and leave a five-star review. Oh yeah, and tell a friend.