Why Liquidity Is the Most Underrated Asset in Investing with M.C. Laubscher - Episode- 562

for the first time in probably our recorded history, this is— you're going to have the largest group of, of people, the baby boomers, that are going into their golden years. And assets will transfer from the baby boomers, which there's a lot of booming babies, uh, 70s, what, 76 million? I lost count. And just in the United States. But globally, we're looking at You know, $124 trillion is the estimates of assets that's going to transfer.

Markets shift, business cycles, tax laws change, yet some families continue to grow wealth quietly across generations. This conversation explores the principles behind engineering wealth structures that endure long after the paycheck stops. Welcome to Streams to Impact, brought to you by Steve Tucker Capital. I'm your host, Dr. Allen. There comes a moment in the life of every high-achieving professional when success quietly shifts. What once felt like freedom begins to feel fragile. Income is strong, the career is solid, yet the system you are playing in demands more of your time, more of your energy, and more of your capital than it gives back. Many discover that the paycheck, no matter how large, was never designed to create lasting freedom. It was designed to keep money Moving, and most often away from you. But there is another way—a path long understood by sophisticated families and private investors who focus not on accumulation but on control: control of cash flow, control of taxation, control of how capital is deployed so that it serves life's purposes and legacy. Beyond the paycheck is the financial clarity compass—an instructional mini masterclass created by me, Dr. Allen, professor of psychology and investment counseling. This private educational experience is your gift from us. To claim your gift, visit www.go.stetucker.com/beyond-paycheck. Just a brief disclaimer before we begin: all information shared on Streams to Impact is for educational purposes only. It is not intended as investment, legal, or tax advice. All investments carry risk, including the possible loss of principal. You should not invest unless you are prepared to lose 100% of your investment. Views shared by guests are not necessarily those of Stead Talker Capital or the host, Dr. Allen. You're always encouraged to consult your legal, accounting, and tax advisor before making any investment decisions. Well, what does it take to move beyond accumulation and design wealth that actually endures? Well, today's guest, M.C. Lobster, has dedicated his work to helping business owners and investors reclaim control over their financial lives. As the founder of Producer's Wealth, he guides clients to master cash flow, deploy capital intentionally, and build wealth structured, designed to last for generations. He's also a bestselling author and the host of the globally respected Cashflow Ninja podcast, where he has interviewed hundreds of elite thinkers to uncover how real wealth is built, protected, and sustained over time. At the heart of his philosophy is a simple truth: wealth is not about income alone, but about sovereignty, resilience, and long-term optionality. Today, we explore how business owners can step out of fragile financial systems and begin engineering wealth That truly outlives them. So welcome, MC. We're glad that you are with us today. So as we began looking back on your journey, was there a moment when you realized that lack of liquidity was not just a financial constraint, but a loss of freedom, leverage, or even identity as an investor? So what did that moment change and How you think about wealth today?

Yeah, great question. And I appreciate you having me on. I've been looking forward to our conversation. Yeah, I think on my investment journey, so I started, boy, 25, 26 years ago as a real estate investor. So I actually was playing in a sports league. And I thought I had a fantastic opportunity to build something outside of sports that I could retire to instead of when I'm done playing sports, end up in the situation where you're like, well, what now? Right? So I started as a single-family investor investing in real estate. And I kind of went down that path— excuse me— that path after coming across the work of Robert Kiyosaki. Rich Dad Poor Dad. So I read that and I'm like, well, this is fantastic. I'm an action taker. So I took action. I bought my first single-family property and put some tenants in it, collected the rent, paid all of the bills associated with the property. And at the end of the month, guess what? There was money left over, cash flow. And I'm like, wow, just like in the book. This is amazing. How many times can I do this? This is fantastic. Can I get 10, 15, 20, 30 of these units? And so, that got me really excited. And of course, Star wanted to buy more of it. So, to answer your question directly, that was my first very, very heavy lesson of lack of liquidity because I, at that stage too, believed all the mantras, cash is trash, you got to deploy it, all this stuff. And I've said that for many years too, until you get into a situation where you need it, right? Then it's not so trash. But I think when you scale, especially in real estate, and business owners can relate to it because this happens in many different businesses, but when you scale, the next thing that starts to happen is just say you buy 1 or 2 more properties. Well, it's real estate. You're dealing with other human beings that are your tenants. So the next thing that you know, rents are late or not paid, things are broken that needs to be fixed. All the fun things that involve being a real estate investor. And if you don't have operating capital and access to liquidity in those times, guess what? You're in a bind. And I think that was— I'm so glad that I learned it on a small scale Because at that stage, it was like 3 or 4 properties. And I started to roll all of the profits and equity of the one into the next one to build out this portfolio. And before you know it, tenants not paying, tenants damaging a property, dealing with evictions, and hard lessons learned. But at that stage, I'm like, I don't have access to cash. So here I go, back on credit cards, just to pay for everything and get everything up and running. And now I'm beholden again to a financial institution and an outside party. And of course, I don't have control over my cash flow because I've got to repay it, right? Because the interest rates are staggering at that time. So I was young at that stage too. So you don't have the most favorable rates. But I think that to your question, that's when it really struck me and I had my light bulb moment where I'm like, wait a second, you have to have a reservoir of capital for emergencies, for unexpected events, even as you scale, because you can always fall back on that to remedy the— manage the properties that you have. So, for business owners, we deal with that all the time. And Even in my other businesses, I took that lesson because every business is seasonal. So whether you're in real estate, whether you have a product-based business, a service business, everything is seasonal. So very easy to run and operate a business when cash flow and revenues are high, right? I call that the summer period of cash flow in the 4 seasons. The complete opposite of that is the winter. So a little bit more challenging, right? Fixed overheads, rent, payroll, other expenses. So usually in that cash flow season of the 4 seasons, you have your highest revenue month, which is your summer. Then it starts to slow down into the fall, which then hits into the winter. And then you need capital to manage that. And guess what? You need capital to get out from the winter back into the spring, back into the summer. It's a new marketing campaign. It's incorporating technology such as AI. It's hiring employees. employees and so forth. So, you know, I'm glad I learned it at a young, young age, those lessons, because the challenge becomes bigger and the numbers become bigger. And I think every single business owner out there can relate to that, you know, whether it's physical products, ordering products, selling products, there's a delay in getting payments for the products that you're selling versus paying your supplier. You know, there's— you always need some liquidity. It's kind of the glue of all of this, whether it's real estate or whether it's, uh, business.

Absolutely. And I can certainly relate to that. And the lesson that I had to learn as well, everything was great and fine and wonderful until 2008, and suddenly it wasn't any longer. And yes, that lack of liquidity, um, was the death of me at that point in time. Well, MC, when investors hear the word liquidity, what do you believe they most commonly misunderstand? And why does that misunderstanding quietly put them at risk?

Most investors, when they hear liquidity or cash, they think, oh, well, I'm not investing or doing something with the money. That's the immediate assumption. And you know what's interesting? If you look at Warren Buffett, he had a saying, doing nothing is also doing something. So I think sometimes, because we have— we human beings, we're strange things. We have these things going on in our heads and these emotions. And we have anxiety of when we're sitting on a large amount of capital saying, well, I could earn this, or maybe I should invest in this, or maybe I should place it there. And the one step even worse is that is when we have FOMO. You know, when we, we're having a conversation with a friend or another investor that's telling you, well, you know what, I really stocked up on silver over the past couple of years. And now all of a sudden you've got anxiety, your FOMO that just like 3x'd, was it like, uh, in like basically 6 months. So you feel like you have to do something. Well, that's the, the, Very, very common. You're human if this is you listening to this, because we've all been there. We actually have to retrain ourselves and rewire ourselves. So, I turned that FOMO into JOMO, the joy of missing out. So, I don't need to be on every ride. I don't need to participate in every upswing of every market. I stay in my lane. I stay in assets and in strategies which is aligned with my strengths, and the rest, I have JOMO, I have joy of missing out. But back to your point on liquidity too, so very misunderstood because when you go to cash and you have liquidity, there are ways to warehouse it where you still get a very nice, predictable, but lower return on it that is essentially savings because you don't take any risk on it. I think we've also in our world of marketing, change the definitions of things. So savings is when you put your money into something with not a massive return, but you protect the principal. That's literally your primary objective. Where investing is, you're always at risk to lose some or all of it. So when liquidity, you put it into savings, and eventually you warehouse it there until the correct opportunities present themselves where You have much more control. You can manage risk. You have more control over the outcome. So, it's not a bad thing at all. And especially you referenced 2008, 2009. How many investors would have loved to have access to liquidity when markets just were crashing everywhere and everything was on a fire sale, right?

Absolutely, yes. And And yeah, I didn't have it. And those who did did very, very well through 2008, where I suffered for many years after that. So from what you've observed, what are the most costly mistakes investors make when we have virtually everything we have tied up and it's inaccessible?

Yeah, so to your point, and I just wanna add to this too, me too, in 2008, 2009, I was very, very young and I started to see the market come down. And I learned this very hard lesson, which every investor learn at some stage in their career. And it's called catching a falling knife. Pretty painful because you see it goes down, it's falling off the table and you're like, oh wow, this is what everybody in the books talks about. And the people at the meetups, which was so in-person before. Now today you have to be like, hey, it's in-person. Every meetup was in-person back then. But anyway, I caught a falling knife. Very, very painful. So, which leads into the other lesson too, of like when people say, man, things are so bad, it can't get any worse. And I draw on my experience from my younger days and say, no, no, no, no. Oh, no. Things can get much worse. They always can. There's always another level of worse. Trust me, because I went into the market when it was down 30%, 40%. I'm like, things can't get any worse. This is the bottom. Oh, no, it can and it will. And the drop below that is even more violent than the first leg down. But anyway, what mistakes do people make? They get into a situation too, where they're forced to sell. When you have illiquid— and this is actually the most painful situation to be in as an investor, because even if you were— you're still in the money, you're still like, you bought an asset for— and it's— and it, like they said, $100,000, it went to $1 million, it goes down to $500,000. And you're still up $400,000, but you don't have any money left. You have to actually sell off some assets to get liquidity. The painful experience there is, number one, you're selling off a great asset that has served you well. And then number two, the more painful asset is, well, you've now invited someone else into your living room, and that is Uncle Sam that's going to sit down and say, well, There's still some profit there, my friend. So guess what? You've triggered a taxable event too. So even selling things that you don't want to sell, you now have to pay some taxes on that too. So I think that another play to look at, and this is very, very important from building out a strategy, is how do you position assets where you can actually set up lines of credit against it? For liquidity. So this means you don't have to sell off assets, have taxable events in the event that you need liquidity. So most people are familiar with real estate, with a home equity line of credit, cash-out refi. Most people are familiar with some financial— if you have a financial advisor that slightly knows what he's doing, they probably have a line of credit secured by some stocks, asset-based lending. That's what Elon Musk loves to do. And that's how he leverages his Tesla shares to buy other businesses such as X and so forth for the down payments. We've probably— you've probably heard of CDs that could be used as collateral for lending from banks, maybe gold, silver, art. I see in the crypto that's a big, big strategy too, because people don't want to sell their Bitcoin. So they place it as collateral for lending. And then we love life insurance. Life insurance, because you could, as an asset class, just as real estate, it's actually kind of eerie how similar it is, but it's a great place to position capital that's guaranteed growing tax-free. And then you set up a line of credit against it. And the one thing that I love about the life insurance as opposed to the other ones, which I've done many of them, real estate, gold and silver, I've set up lines of credit with that. But the one thing that I that I prefer the life insurance over that is the life insurance, you actually have guaranteed access. And I didn't realize how important that was until 2008, 2009, because, you know, Allen, as you know, when they start pulling HELOCs on real estate, for example, and banks will do that very, very quickly regardless of the terms that they had in place, you need other avenues. So that's the one thing that I like about it. So that's one way of drawing some liquidity from assets in times of need. So that should usually be, you know, your step one, as opposed to just selling something off, triggering taxable events, you know, to draw some liquidity.

Good ideas there. And it gives you liquidity without just letting your cash just sit idle there. It's— you're not putting it in your mattress, you're putting it in places where It isn't returning outstanding returns, but it is returning something. But when you strip away return strategies and structures, what role do you believe liquidity plays in preserving dignity, choice, and stewardship across generations?

Yeah, that's a great question. When you're looking at a multi-generational wealth strategy, And this is the stuff that I'm very passionate to talk about. And this has been the world that I've been operating in for the past 2 to 3 years. I've been studying family offices religiously. I got asked the other day why. I said, well, currently, Ernst& Young just released a report that there's more private capital and wealth in family offices than private equity and venture capital combined. It's staggering the amount. And if you think about where we are at right now, for the first time in probably our recorded history, you're going to have the largest group of people, the baby boomers, that are going into their golden years, and assets will transfer from the baby boomers, which There's a lot of booming babies. Uh, 70s, what, 76 million? I lost count. And just in the United States, but globally we're looking at, you know, $124 trillion is the estimates I've seen, between $90 and $124 trillion with a T of assets that's going to transfer. Now, to your— to, to answer your question directly, what role does liquidity play? Now, imagine yourself to be a— you have a family business, you own a lot of real estate, and let's just say you're a baby boomer. The kids take over the business, there's real estate. If something happens to you and pass away, there's going to be a massive need for liquidity at that stage. Whether it's instead of selling off the business to gain liquidity or the assets, there's going to be some liquidity needed. In some way, shape, or form. So there's a great way to facilitate a more efficient transfer of wealth without paying most of it to the government and advisors, by the way, too. Look, lawyers, CPAs, financial advisors, they'll jump in there and they'll grab a piece of meat too. But if you set up a strategy that in this multigenerational strategy, and I use the asset class of insurance, it's a great way to facilitate it. And to provide a smooth and efficient one tax-free to the heirs. But as far as, yeah, multi-generational, it's one of the most important things because the assets will transfer over, but there's going to be other things that need to be paid, whether it's estate taxes, whether it's just funding life. If dad was the one earning the income and drawing from the business and now the children are taking over and dad passed away, how's I'm going to survive that in the next year or so. So there's a lot of things to think through that. And liquidity usually is the main concern. Even when there's no planning done. And it's, I mean, like I consult with so many people across all 50 states across the United States. I had a conversation with someone the other day and he runs a very successful business and he's like, MC, I wish I met you like 3, 4 years ago. And I said, why? What happened? And he goes, my partner died in my business. And I'm like, oh, wow, I'm sorry to hear that. He goes, yeah, and that's the— he was my friend. The emotional part is just the first part. Now the second part comes in because there was no planning done. Both of them have wives and families. So now it's like, well, the business is— they bring in an independent evaluator of the business. Because you're sitting in a situation now too where the remaining spouse doesn't know anything about the business, wasn't involved at all, doesn't really care about it. So how do you buy her and the family then out? Well, you need liquidity. There wasn't planning done. There's now no liquidity. So now you have to get really, really, really creative. And it's a service-based business too. Try and get loans and lendings for that. You know how hard that is. If it was a manufacturing or physical assets, it's easier than a service-based, because just from a risk management standpoint for the party issuing the loan. So yeah, liquidity is very important. So when you have— you need strategies in place to provide you liquidity or give your family access to liquidity. In times of need, one of the concepts I've mentioned, family offices, one of the concepts that we teach too that's in a family office is a family bank structured and set up like the Rockefellers did. And again, I lose people when I say that because they go, well, I'm not a Rockefeller. What am I going to take away from this? And my response is you don't have to be a Rockefeller to do what the Rockefellers do. It's a scalable model, a blueprint that you could start at any level and copy off of them. Tony Robbins talks about success leaves clues. I don't know, I want to probably copy off the people. They taught you not to do this in school, by the way, but I'd like to copy off the people that currently has the most amount, more capital aggregated in them than private equity and venture capital combined. So I like to copy them and see what they do. And they have this concept of a family bank that's built like the Rockefellers with very specifically designed life insurance policies. And this serves as the family bank where family members have access to capital and liquidity at all times, whether it's emergencies and opportunities.

Excellent advice. And so thank you, MC, for being with us today. So in today's conversation, if it was powerful reminder that wealth is not merely about returns, projections, or accumulation, at its core, it's about choice, resilience, and stewardship. So we explored how liquidity is not idle capital, but strategic freedom, how access, timing, and control often matter more than chasing The highest yields, and how families who endure across generations are not those who took the most risk, but those who preserved optionality when it mattered the most. So our guest, uh, MC shared a grounded and hard-earned perspective shaped by years of working with business owners and investors navigating real-world complexity. And the message is clear. Liquidity protects dignity in downturns, creates opportunities in moments of disruption, and allows wealth to serve life rather than constrain it. So if today's conversation resonates with you, I encourage you to explore MC's work and resources at www.getwealthyforsure.com. And we'll have that information in our show notes as well. And at this site, he shares his systemic approach to cash flow control, private capital strategies, and long-term wealth design. So before we go, I want to remind you once again of the gift I mentioned at the beginning of today's episode. Beyond the Paycheck is the Financial Clarity Compass, an instructional mini masterclass that I created to help high-achieving professionals step back gain clarity and begin aligning their capital with intention, resilience, and long-term impact. You can claim that free gift at www.go.steedtalker.com/beyond-paycheck. Thank you for joining me on Streams to Impact. Until next time, remember, true wealth is not what you accumulate, It is what you engineer to endure.

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