234. Personal Wealth Strategy People Don’t Want You To Know

Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Click yout Shift alongside Ms. Berg, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. We're here to bring you world class crypto research strategies and insights to help you crush this crypto bull market. Plus, get an exclusive behind the scenes look as we scale one of the world's leading crypto research companies. If you like the podcast, we'd love for you to leave us a review or share it with your friends and family. It's how we grow the podcast each and every week for our YouTube leavers to subscribe. And today Burgs, we're taking a bit of a different angle on a couple of sessions I've hosted recently on helping everyday people invest and learn about personal finance as a personal interest area of not only myself, but yours, Burgs Travis as well. A lot of people in our company.

Learn this when you come into crypto because it is what you need to understand investing. But Bitcoin is a gateway drug to realizing how the world is backwards and how it is not set up to help everyone win. In fact, it's actually quite the opposite. There's rules for the wealthy and this is where I got very passionate and excited about bitcoin when I first started nine years ago. It was one of the biggest reasons when I learned about inflation, when I learned about the purchasing power, when I learned about how governments control how much money gets created, when I learned about how you can only invest in certain products if you are an accredited investor. Like they save some of the best investments only for the rich people, you.

Know, to protect, to protect us. Of course, Ben.

Of course, of course.

You know, got to protect the general public.

Protect the general public, you know, tax and you know you don't pay tax until you sell on assets where if you have an income you get paid in your bank account and you only receive what you get post tax. That happens instantly because but when you have investments they grow and they compound and understanding compound is the eighth wonder of the world and how you get discount burgs on your on your tax when you hold it for a period of time. There's just like the more and more you figure this out you go wow, this doesn't make sense. And this is what sent me on a journey, you know, nine years ago and we didn't have a lot of money when we grew up. And talking mom and dad don't own investments, you know, they don't own their Own property. It was taboo sort of conversation. Same with you. And now nine years on learning about a lot of this and going through a very rapid wealth journey on myself and Berge. You know, you've done very well for yourself. You've generated a lot of wealth for you personally over the last number of years. Me starting to learn a lot about that takes you having to do it. I think it's hard to kind of what's not a priority when you don't have money, but then you realize you have to learn it to make money, if that makes sense.

Oh, let's go. So a lot of people and even friends I talk to, they say I don't have enough money to invest. I'll invest when I have money. And that's the equivalent of I'm too tired to go to the gym, I'll go to the gym when I'm not tired. But actually going to the gym and exercising, you'll have more energy and you'll feel better, you'll sleep better, and then you'll be able to go to the gym more. It's a matter of just getting started. So you said something fascinating where crypto's a new entry point for people. So, you know, 10 years ago you wouldn't have invested in crypto slightly more than 10 years because it didn't exist. Right. Or was too weird. And you kind of invest in, you know, shares, bonds, real estate.

And you might not learn all that weird stuff you learn in crypto. You might do some macro stuff, but crypto is very libertarian and anti establishment. And you start to learn about why it existed and why it was created, born out of the gfc. So you do start to learn about all of those macro forces, factors, how money's created. And it is quite a different path. And you learn that a lot earlier than entry points through traditional assets. Yes.

And bergs, you don't. You went to university, you did your MBA. I left year 11. We did two completely sort of different pathways, but I know a lot of your MBA buddies because you tell me, and, and you went through this yourself. You don't, you don't learn necessarily about personal finance necessarily. You learn about economics and all the wazi wah woo woo stuff, but not the shit that actually matters.

So, yeah, yeah, a lot of them are just cooked. I remember we're doing. So this is my first year in my mba. We're doing accounting. We learned how to do a company balance sheet. First thing I did was I went home, did my personal balance sheet. I'm like oh, this is interesting. It's the first time I've ever calculated it in a proper way and none of them ever did that. And I was asking about their investments. They weren't investing in anything. They had superannuation, but that's about it. Some of them were just starting to get houses and over capitalizing on those, they didn't understand loans and structuring. They can do all that stuff within a giant company and get it, but when it comes to doing it for their own house, I'm like, why are you not applying this to yourself? Like, you spend so much time at work, you're working for money. Spend a bit of time understanding money and setting the game up to win.

This is interesting because I was having this thought over the weekend burgs around.

The journey that I've been on on finance and you know, in my business not understanding the, the importance of it. Did the finance directors course. Spent a lot of time wrapping my head around finances and once I understood it and we had actually really quality numbers and we, we now have that runs our numbers internally, how much of a weapon that is to grow your wealth. But when you think about your personal finances, what are we doing about our personal finances which are arguably more important, right? Like we don't have someone looking after them, we don't have a profit and loss statement. There's no balance sheet, there's no reconciliation of transactions, there's no, there's no nothing, bro.

The first thing our lecturer said was if you understand accounting and finance, you get a free kick in life. And that is so true. The amount of people I know that still do their own tax, I'm like, what the fuck? You don't cut your own hair. What are you doing? Get a professional. They're so much cheaper and they will save you so much money. Just go for it. But it's almost seen like it's one of those even other things. Like this one really gets me like I don't want to earn more money because I'll go up a tax bracket, I have to pay more tax. It's like what the. Oh, bro, you would not believe. For every marginal dollar. Yes. But they think they're going to pay it for all the money that they earned.

Oh, that is all these kind of.

Like, oh, wives tales out there. And you're like, no, that's not the way it works. But it's this very difficult thing to engage with. And because we don't talk about money in society, we don't talk about investing, we don't talk about finance or wealth that these things aren't discussed. And you think it's just for this weird group, one that did my nut. So when I worked in government, they offer a thing called salary packaging. So a portion of your income, so your pay as you go, kind of, you know, fortnightly pay, let's say 400 bucks can be tax free and you can spend that on only certain things like a car, a mortgage, a few other things, and then the rest you pay tax on. It's a benefit of being in a government. Right. It's one of the things they do to attract and retain people because they pay lower wages. And people like, oh, no, I don't want to do that. That's cheating. I'm like, what are you talking about? It's literally an incentive from the government for you to do this. Oh, but I want to pay my tax. Otherwise it's cheating. Like, are you mental? And they don't understand, Ben, when they say pay tax, they think it's only that they don't understand that on everything, almost everything they buy they pay GST excises, alcohol tax, fuel tax, God knows whatever other tax. They don't understand all of that. And that's okay. But God damn, like, if you're really complaining about things and you think things are unfair and just spend a little bit of time to learn about it and you'll be so far ahead because it ain't that hard, it ain't that complex.

That is honestly the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I don't want to earn more money because I'm going to pay more tax. No, like you pay tax based on the money you earn. And if you go into a different tax bracket, you just pay higher tax amount for that portion. But you still make like, yes, it's every margin.

So here you go. Two people in our company have said that to me and I was like, our company? Our company? Yes. They weren't, they weren't analysts. I'll tell you who they were.

Well, actually, to your point, I just actually made a notebook because I think like one thing that I'm thinking straight off the bat, like, we're doing all this education for our followers and our audience and stuff, but I think actually, you know, and this is what I did the other night with, you know, and we'll talk about these presentations I've done recently. But like, actually Berg's like maybe one for our team. But also I'm thinking about family, our families as well.

Oh, 100%, absolutely, man. And like, because people don't want to engage with this and it is very difficult. So you've done two of them now and you kicked off with one. And I remember we're in the WhatsApp chat and you're sending us all these like crazy AI like pictures of like you with like it's five AIs talking to each other and you're making this, you know, magic slides and everything. Talk us through what you actually did and who it was for for the first one because this was incredible to see.

Yeah, so this was actually a really interesting process because the presentations and content that I do is really tailored towards a really high affluent investor. You know, 40 year old male, married, kids with net worth of probably, you know, at least high six figures, if not seven figures, to do a presentation to my girlfriend's friends. So she wanted to host a little investing night with her friends because she'd learned a lot since being with me and she's like, I want my friends to know this as well. Can you put on a night? Can you present? I'm like, sure, that sounds fun. And then like it got to the day of the event, I'm like, okay, what am I actually like there's so.

Much like two hour deadline.

Oh, it was a five hour deadline and I spent four of those using the new AI banana tool on Google, using images. And then I was like an hour before, I was like, okay, I need to put this together. But I'd been, you know, really making a lot of notes and thinking about this over time, like, okay, what are the most important things? Well, the first thing that really blew my mind and like really got me understanding about personal finance was rich dad, poor dad and the, and the money quadrant. That was like the clearest thing for me that I'm like, this makes so much sense. Are you above the line where you're earning dollars for income, where you're an employee or you're self employed, or do you have money working for you? And that is either being a business owner or an investor. And the idea of having money work for you or people doing the work and then paying you based on those investments was just like, oh my goodness, I need to be there. So what I did is I called it the. And the demographic by the way to our listeners was essentially 26 year olds to 35 year old females who none of them, I believe, invest, or maybe one or two of them had invested before. And I was like, cool, okay, how am I going to do this? So I called it the investing Education Girls night. Your wealth glow up guide, proudly sponsored by Lots of wine, lots of cheese, which, which, which made it interesting. But I started with the rich dad, poor dad analogy, but I changed it to my girlfriend's name's Laura. So I made it rich Laura, poor Laura. And I went through what rich Laura would do versus what poor Laura would do. And it really all always started around like, you know, that money mindset and like thinking that investors is too hard, thinking investing is for rich people. Or just, you know, living for today, ignoring for tomorrow, spending the paycheck before it's payday, buying designer things, not saving any money, not investing thinking is too complicated versus rich girl Laura has money working for her. She automatically invests percentage of income every week. She diversifies and she spends the, the interest or the compounding returns of our investments.

Not the actual principle. So that was like the overview. And I started what was interesting. We started with a money confession booth. So I did spill your financial tea. So they had to anonymously write down.

Confessing their poor girl Laura moments. And they wrote down at a non judgment zone, what is a confession, a money confession that they have. And you know, a lot of it was around, you know, spending too much on their credit card, you know, going on holidays, borrowing money to do certain things, you know, all sorts of different things. And the big thing burges that you touched on before is what I opened this presentation with is money is money is a taboo subject. It runs the world, but no one talks about it. So having this like kind of cool, safe area where people could talk about it really allowed people to be a little more open in things and realizing that, you know, a lot of them have credit card debt. None of them are really investing for the future. And I went through.

I actually used Taylor Swift as a case study and we used like, you know, Taylor is, you know, her albums and like the financial impact she has on going on tour, where the cash flow she generates on tour is like an amazing thing. But then she invests that money into, you know, building out different ventures, real estate, like, you know, owning 100% of her own albums and how that produces money ongoing. And it was just, it was a really cool thing for.

These, these girls to kind of understand why investing is important. And I showcase to them charts on what happens with your cash and income, with inflation and how much you lose with inflation every year. And that the hidden cost, that is the silent, I called it the silence, the silent thief stealing your money. And we went through inflation, we went through compounding Interest and the. And the chart of like, if you just held 3% in your bank versus compounding interest and how the human brain actually really struggles to compute. Compounding interest. The eighth one of the world.

Yeah, we can't do nonlinear thinking.

No. It's kind of hard to wrap your head around. And then beyond that, you know, I didn't want to make this a crypto thing, but I obviously they all know me as the. As Bitcoin Ben, as they call me. And it's funny, like, a few of the girls boyfriends are big fans of us, so they, they actually wrote questions for their girlfriends to. They wanted to come, but they weren't allowed because it was a girl's night.

Amazing.

So I shared, you know, why bitcoin is. Is what I'm all in on. But then I also shared about ETFs and spoke about ETFs as, you know, having essentially like hiring a team of companies to work for you and you own a piece of hundreds of companies. And, you know, we went through what that looks like. We went through like, diversifying. We then just did the normal budgeting, 50, 30, 20 rule where like, if you put 50% of your needs 30% wants, 20% investing, what that would look like, how much you could potentially, you know, have in the future. And a lot of Q and A. And yeah, it was really good. I think it was really insightful for a lot of them. And two or three of them studied economics and finance. And both they all said, we haven't learned any of this. Like, none of this personal finance stuff is spoken about.

Exactly. Right. And this comes back to, you know, it's just a few habits that are keeping you poor. Right. Like those habits keep you poor and if you learn some just better financial hygiene habits that you execute on over time and they're not massive changes. Going to the gym every day is much bloody harder. This is super easy. You'll be much better off. And I like that you talked about the cash flow quadrant as well. And what sticks in my mind from Robert Kiyosaki in his book was, I'm not rich, but my business is. So he has this giant asset that generates cash flow that works for him and he can afford his lifestyle, which was just amazing. Love it. Oh, I saw this. I saw this, like, little TikTok video over the weekend. And it's just this couple and they make funny ones and he. He kidnapped her. And they're not playing as a couple, just like kidnaps. It takes the hood off, like her in his apartment. And he's like, oh, you're my prisoner now. And she's like, okay. And she's all terrified. And then he's like, yeah, you know, that's it. You're never gonna leave this apartment. And he goes on and on. She's like, wait, I get to live here? I don't have to pay rent. Are you gonna feed me? She's like, yes. It's like, I could do what I want here. Well, yeah. And she's like, well, what's the downside? And, like, that was, like, a really comical way of understanding how much financial pressure people are actually under, like, how expensive things are.

Just basic housing, everything else compared to wages. And people feel like they can't invest because things are getting so expensive. Yeah.

And money, I believe, is one of the top reasons that couples get divorced from. Minus.

Oh, it's finance number one, 100%. It's above infidelity.

Wow. And it's true, like, you know, people want to do different things. One of the questions from the girls was, you know, where does holidaying come into this? Because once you've. If they spend their money on a holiday, they don't have money to invest. And my answer to that was like, there is no answer to it. It's an answer that you have to answer that, you know, do you go on the holiday? And by the way, I love going on and doing trips and spend that money, or do you try and delay it and invest first? And, you know, look at that. And I think for a lot of people, including myself, when I first started investing, you start out with nothing. And it's so. It's like, what's the point? But the point is that it takes time. And, you know, for two years, I took my salary in Bitcoin back in 2018 and 2019, on and off, because I needed to spend something. I was living at home, didn't have a lot of expenses. I was able to actually create a lot of my. And accumulate a lot of assets when. During that period that got me to where I needed to get to, to, you know, compound and grow. But you start. You start with nothing. There's not really.

Yeah. I think it's like, anything you want to be successful at, you have to make sacrifice. And it can be like, hey, I want to do all these things in my life. And then you start to put those in the different years of your life, however long you're going to live. And when you're first starting out, it might be a couple of years where you don't go on massive holidays. You might go on cheaper ones, you know, you might go to Southeast Asia or you might go locally or something like that, you know, but have your time out, but sacrifice that and start to get ahead. And then from there you built a decent base and then you can keep going and start to harvest some of those gains. That's what my wife and I did when we were planning for kids where we're both working full time, we're both on decent wages, we saved as much as we could, and then we're able to pay down a lot of our house. She was able to go part time and then eventually, probably two years after that, not have to work. And just by that little bit of planning, you'd be surprised at how far ahead you can get. And having that delayed gratification and then having so much more freedom later in your life, it's a. Definitely a good trade. But a lot of people feel like, hey, if I don't go on holidays, if I don't do this, if I don't keep out up, I'm missing out. And that's a bit of a trap.

It is, it is. And also like, not preparing for the future, like, that was the kind of core part of. So I did that presentation for my, my girlfriend's friends. And then last week on Friday, I went out to Bendigo and we did a presentation to the women's national basketball team. Bendigo. So my sister plays there. Collectors is a proud sponsor of the, the WMBL Bendigo team, which is awesome. So I went out there and did a presentation for their professional athletes. So they're all full time, they're professional athletes by, by income. And you know, unfortunately.

You know, women's pay, especially in basketball, is very, very small in comparison to barely make a living.

Right?

No, my sister is not that great. No, no, no. I can barely. If you 1 or 2%. Yes. But like, for most players, they're, they're having to, you know, at least have another job or play multiple teams or, you know, it's crazy. And, and I spoke to this to the girls, you know, because I talked to my sister about. This is like the unfortunate thing about being a professional athlete is that there is a, there is a literal clock on how long you all will be able to play this level for. And after that clock ends, the payment will stop as well. So you need to be thinking about beyond your career and how compounding interest will help you grow your investments beyond your playing career. And you need to utilize as much as you can, the income you're generating to invest to, to help you beyond your career. And you know, that was the kind of the big, the big part of that conversation with them. And.

You know, funnily enough there we did, so we did the confession booth with my girlfriend and then we did the locker room confessions with the, with the players. But they, to be fair to them, they actually didn't have many bad confessions because, you know, from my understanding with my sister is like that, you know, they don't actually have a lot of money to spend anyway. It's actually really, it's sad, you know, the two, the two main players on the team like that, they're, they're sort of best players, I guess you'd call them probably highest paid earners that were, they were very smart, actively investing ETFs, property, those sorts of things.

But yeah, it's, it's a hard pill to swallow when you look at not having money to be able to afford to invest. You're just using it to live and knowing what happens with inflation year on year and how far you're getting behind. Like it sucks.

Yeah. And it's just thinking ahead and thinking about the awesome things you want in your life and paying for those. A classic one that got a lot of my mates in trouble, male and female, was, you know, in your late 20s, you kind of find someone, then you get married, get a house and eventually have a kid. It's a general path for most people. What they didn't factor in was they'll both quite highly paid, they'll both spending a lot, they've got a very expensive house. But as soon as they had a child.

The wife wanted to, or husband in some cases wanted to go part time because they wanted to spend more time with the kid. That's their priority now, not their work. But they hadn't modeled that reduction in income into the expenses that they had. And these are very smart people. So just thinking ahead, at least five years ahead, what you would like to have in your life and planning for that will make it so easy for you. And just the basics as well, like having an emergency fund, like six months worth of expenses start there after you've got that everything else start to put into investments, start to grow those and you're away. Like it's not difficult stuff, it's just paying yourself first and what you've got just live with within what you've got left over. Don't overspend, don't keep up with other people. It's okay to say no. It's okay to say no. I can't go to your destination wedding. I can't go on that holiday I'm planning for this thing. This is my priority. It is okay to say that.

Yeah, totally, totally. And yeah, the way I put it to the team on Friday was having the 5050 strategy, so defense and offense and I had the basketball courts. A defensive half, you have assets that protect your wealth. Lower risk things like ETF stability. And then the offensive half, you can have some higher risk investments, maybe look at some different things that, you know, return that your, your percentages will be completely up to you. Not financial advisors by any stretch of the imagination. But having a balanced portfolio, in our opinion, is the best way to do it.

And I think those kind of primers are just nice to give people a little bit of an understanding and a few words to just engage with professionals to get them on the right path. Because just having that knowledge, when you go and see a professional, it's very hard to understand what they're talking about, let alone discern if what they're doing is actually good for you or good for them. Yes, there's a lot of dodgy people out there.

Yes. And you need to understand people's incentives. And I think that's, that is an important one. And also, like a lot of these people, in my opinion, financial advisors, most of them are just rubbish because none of them have actually made money in their life. They just read a book and then tell you what the book says. This reminds me, because when I used to be a basketball referee, right. The best referees were not those that understood the book the best. They understood it because they were players, they understood the game, they understood what was going on. Those, those referees that were book smart, that could read you the book back to front were the worst because they had no understanding of people and, and, and the environment they were in and the game itself. And you know that it was just everything was black and white and life isn't black and white.

Oh, even you, like, you've got a very high level understanding of this. Sorry, deep understanding of this. And even like with your mortgage broker, that's a classic one, like, you know, you're modeling out all this stuff and different deposits and what it would look like, or paying the thing in full. And when they came back, I'm like, wait, why are you doing it this way? Like pay less and then put that money into Bitcoin, you'll be much better off. And you're like, that's what I thought. And then he went back to him and he's like, oh, yeah, okay. But he absolutely beat you down into submission with his way of thinking.

Yes.

And then we had a conversation. I'm like, no, that's not right. I spent one and a half minutes in Excel and showed you. And you're like, that's exactly what I thought. And then you went back to him and you were armed with that knowledge. But like, even someone like you, when you're speaking to a professional, sometimes it can be like, oh, fuck, it's all too hard.

Or totally.

It can be quite challenging.

Well, yeah. And these people the more. And I've even noticed this more recently as your wealth grows and you're doing different things and I'm doing different things. And, you know, investing property this, that and the other. There's fewer and fewer people burks that I've found that I've actually done it before that you can learn from. And it's like you're in a different ball game now. And now you're just speaking to people that. And this is what I don't like about the way rules and regulation works in the financial space. Because no one's actually allowed to tell you what their opinion is. It's all by the book that God knows who wrote God knows how long ago. And if you go without those rules, oh, goodness me, God forbid. We have our own opinion to make up our own mind. Like, it has to be within the realm, like.

Yeah, yeah. Another thing is if you're already on this journey, you can and you will outgrow your advisors.

Yes.

So you need to know when that point in time is. I've outgrown a lot of my advisors. Advisors. I even have multiple advisors for certain things. Like I have my main tax guy that does everything and they have my tax crypto guy because it's so specific. Even with you being in business, you got multiple advisors for the one thing because they all bring something different to the table. This is not one person has everything you need when you're at a very, very high level.

This is honestly a cheat code that I want all of the, you know, you guys that are listening to this to really, you know, double down on. We did a episode. I'll try and pick up the number while we're talking here. But advisors for me is the hack is the fast track way to get to where you want to get to without going through all the BS of stuffing it up, making poor decisions, losing a bunch of money.

Because you have someone that has been through their experience before and you pay for their experience now. Episode 226, why hiring coaches allowed me to go from high school dropper to multimillionaire. We go through all the coaches and advisors. I actually during that podcast was talking about the property buyer's agent, you know, person that I signed, Jack, his name is out of Sydney. He's essentially what he does for like what collective shift is for crypto he does for property. And sat down with him, paid $10,000 for an initial strategy session. Now people go, holy moly, that's a lot of money. What I got out of that session with him was an experience share from the guy that's built $40 million in property. He's a business owner, he's a young guy like me. And he shared with me all of his experiences, frameworks, mistakes, everything that he wish he didn't do when he started. He told me from the get go. And utilizing Bergs as well is, you know, build his property as well. Together with him Bergs, I've got a main accountant, crypto, tax accountant, broker, and then a bunch of other advisors, cfo. All sorts of different people combined all that together. And then that's what gave me the strategy that I have now that I believe will be worth.

Exactly infinitely more.

Than I've built, like some portfolio, property portfolio, but nothing compared to this guy. And then he advises all these other people so he gets to see what they do like you do in crypto. And the conversation you had with him, you told me was like this, all right, how did you do this? Why did you do it like that? What did you stuff up? What would you do again? Right? Tell me this structure, why did you choose that structure? Just like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And you've just got a person that's just lived it, they've been through the war and you can gain all the experience and knowledge from them and accelerate your journey. And it is totally worth it because you look at 10 grand, you're going to make way more than 10 grand worth of mistakes. Doing it yourself or just having average advisors, ten grand is nothing. Over the lifetime of a portfolio, we're.

Looking at buying a $900,000 house exactly like. And also people that just go, you know, go all in to, you know, get a home occupier property. Not only is a $900,000 house. Well, even for me, I'm paying 6% interest over 30 years. You're paying double that. You're paying hundreds. Like, it is a huge, huge, huge financial decision. The fact that you don't pay to get good insights or information.

Mind boggling.

Absolutely, mate.

Anyway, that was, that was the insights. That was the sort of the route that we went down. And I think for me, like, yeah, very fulfilling experience. Really, really enjoyed helping other people and learning that hey, this thing is very taboo and not a lot of people understand it and I didn't either when I started out and I'm still learning, we're always learning, but like being able to share these insights and help other people on the way. I think there's definitely something there that I'd love to do a bit more Bergs you and I have spoken about to help, you know, people think about, you know, the personal finance side because, you know, I don't know where you learn this stuff.

Yeah, exactly right. Or you get bum advice, you get sold into a weird course or product.

No, absolutely not. So hopefully you enjoyed that. Folks, if you enjoyed this episode or you think anyone in your circle, friendship circle, family would enjoy this, we'd love for you to share it with them. It's how we grow Ben and Bergs each and every week. Bit over two years we've been creating content now doing these episodes. We don't do sponsorships, don't do advertising or anything like that. We just want to give you guys free value and hopefully you are enjoying it. If you can help us out by sharing with a friend or family member, we would very, very much appreciate it. And we will continue bringing you these episodes each and every week. So thank you so much and we'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks champions.