Flipping Retirement on its Head

Coach Heddon pulled me aside after practice. This could only mean one thing. I was going to be pulled up from the freshman basketball team to the Junior Varsity. I had been playing pretty well, and our team was winning.

“We need to work on your shot.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”, I said to myself. I’ve been draining 3’s left and right. I’ve been diligently working on my shot since I barely made the 7th grade team.

“You’re using your left hand too much. It should be your guide hand, but you’re using it almost equally as your primary right shooting hand”.

He took me to the auxiliary gym, and spent an hour drilling me on how my shot should look. It was late in the season, and I had no interest in changing my shot in season. I heard him, but I didn’t want to listen.

It wasn’t until I broke my leg my Junior year, in just my 4th game as a starter, that took me out for the entire season that I started to consider the change. I had worked so hard to get here. I wasn’t the best athlete by any stretch, but my secret sauce was I was willing to outwork every other kid by a long shot. I spent countless hours in my parent’s cul-de-sac working on my shot. The thought of changing it was overwhelming, as I knew that I would get worse before I got better.

What else did I have to do? It was such a dark period in my life, every practice and every game staring wishfully from the sidelines, dreaming to be on the court. I was in a walking cast, so I could at least shoot free throws. I shot free throws probably over 10,000 times that season, all with my new shot. And I did get worse for a time, and then gradually I could see improvement and greater consistency with my shot percentage.

In my Senior year, I darn near broke several school shooting records. I sank 83% of my free throws and was 50% from the 3 point line. We ended up winning the conference championship, which was a dream of mine since I was a little water boy. Clearly, the procrastinated change made a serious difference.

The bottom line is, making changes, even if we are pretty sure they are in our long term best interests, is very painful and hard for us humans to do. Oftentimes it takes hitting bottom or a dark time for us to be willing to make tough decisions to change. I hope you don’t have to hit the dark bottom to accept this change I’m going to suggest with your wealth building strategy.

Investing and Retirement

You see, we are programmed from an early age to think of investing in terms of retirement planning. The entire philosophy is to continually invest into the stock market for growth in your portfolio, and after 40 years of delayed gratification, you’ll arrive in this magnificent oasis of your golden years with abundant financial resources to live how you want.

And once you get closer to retirement, you want to adjust your portfolio to generate more income instead of growth, with an emphasis on more safety as you have less time to make up for losses in your portfolio.

I believe you should do the opposite.

From what I’ve seen, most younger investors either gamble too much with their initial investment funds, or they simply cannot see the benefit of delaying gratification for forty years with the traditional approach. They soon sabotage themselves by either losing their hard earned money in speculative, gamble-like deals, or they just do nothing. I can’t tell you how many young guys I know put too much money into crypto, or bought digital eCommerce stores with their first 50k. Digital assets are still early, and any early stage asset is going to be highly volatile and extremely risky.

By focusing on multiple streams of income from the start, you can build your future on a firm foundation of safe, secure assets that consistently kick off cash flow, and give yourself the gift that keeps on giving: Income Consistency.

Young entrepreneurs will consistently have to deal with income inconsistency. Their business will cycle, and their job will always be at a risk from downsizing, corporate restructuring, office politics - you name it. If it can be disrupted, typically at some point, it will be too.

After going for massive growth in my portfolio as a 22-year-old senior in college with $50,000 in hard earned cash saved up, I learned my lesson the hard way. I invested into 100% tech stocks in March of 2000, and by September I was down $25,000. I panic-sold like many did, trying to figure out how I could possibly lose so much in such a short period of time that took me three years of grinding effort and delayed gratification to accumulate. “You know how many great fucking parties I could have thrown with that money?”, I constantly asked myself. Would have been a lot more fun and memorable than losing to other sharks in the market.

That dark period forced me to look at a different strategy. I then stayed away from stocks for many years. In fact, the next time I bought any stocks was in the post 2008 crash. Here was what my strategy looked like:

• From 2000-2008, I invested most of my cash flow back into myself and my business.
• Then, I focused on buying cash flowing real estate.
• I started with single family homes, and then worked my way into bigger deals like self-storage private funds.
• I did a lot of stock options to generate safer, consistent income from the market.
• I set up a high cash value whole life insurance policy that consistently cranks out dividends and interest.

Once I had a portfolio of multiple streams, I took that income and speculated with it.

Today, I use that income to buy up assets that are riskier, but have a reasonable chance of going up 10x or more in the next decade. My riskier bets are cryptocurrency alt coins, tech growth stocks, and private placements.

If these don’t work out, then the income from my portfolio of safe assets will replenish the income, and my lifestyle isn’t affected. I can swing for the fences again. Or, I can use it to shield against disruptions to my primary income.

As I said before, this is an inevitability of early income generation. There is nothing I can do about the fact that consumers are getting pummelled by high gas, housing, and food prices that are sucking dry their discretionary income. With consumers having less disposable income, they aren’t buying as much of our health and nutrition products from my primary business, the one I started in college from the dorms. So naturally, we are seeing an income dip from that business.

But what if that were my only source of income? I don’t mean to sound doomsday, because this business is not going anywhere and I’m sure it will climb back, but in the meantime, that could be a significant disruption in our normal cash flows. We may have had to scale back some of our luxury expenditures like renting a lake house next weekend.

Fortunately, money rarely if ever weighs in on our decision. If we want to do it, we don’t ever have to have the sit down budget conversation. There really is no budget when avalanches of cash flow come in from so many different sources.

Here’s where to gain more insight

The question you’re probably asking is, “Yeah, all this sounds great, but I have no idea what safe, passive cash flow assets are available or what to invest in.” I get this question all the time on LinkedIn, as you can see this is pretty typical for one of my posts.

This is why I created two additional resources for you:

First, my free guide, “The 9 Safe Passive Income Plays to Invest in Today.” This is going to tell you WHAT to invest in. This report took me hundreds of hours and study to vet and determine that, indeed these would protect your wealth and kick off multiple streams of income for you. I believe just based on this guide, you could go out on your own and figure out how to invest into them. I wish I had a resource like this when I first started investing. I want to continually add value to you in the hopes that eventually you’ll value my content so much, you’ll share it with your social channels and give me some five star reviews.

Hit the “Subscribe” button on the top to be one of the first people to know when I release this free guide.

Second, if you want to take a deeper dive and implement any of these 9 ideas, then my online video course will give you the HOW to buy them, and any other important considerations. For example, in my guide is a description of convertible bonds, which may sound ultra conservative and something more suited for your 85-year-old sweet Grandma to invest in because she needs fixed income, but when you pull back the curtain, you’ll learn that you can create safe, guaranteed income, AND have the chance to see 10x capital growth. In the course, “The Indestructible Wealth Builder”, I give you three that you can invest in now. They are immediately actionable, and have been thoroughly vetted by a large research team. These companies, as you’ll learn, have almost no chance of ever going out of business, thus protecting your principal capital, but also having a chance of some serious growth.

This is exactly what we want to be focused on in our early investing days - protection, stability, income AND growth - which typically doesn’t come with income producing assets.

Whenever you're ready, there are 5 ways I can help you:

1. Learn the strategies to create multiple streams of passive income with my new book, Building Indestructible Wealth, here.

2. Build the foundation of your plan with my online learning course, The Indestructible Wealth Builder here.

3. Develop and implement specific strategies in real estate, stocks, and crypto to generate income. Learn how to buy early-stage assets that can 10x in value with my Advanced Indestructible Wealth Builder online learning course here.

4. Invest along with me. Join my private Premiere Mastermind group to get real-time alerts on pre-IPO's, stocks, real estate, and crypto.

5. Work 1:1 with me to get focused, intense guidance to turbocharge your results.