237. Our Full Wealth Strategy Breakdown in 23 Minutes

Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs Podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of collective shift alongside Ms. Bergs, 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 share these episodes with a friend or family member. It's how we grow the podcast each and every week. Now today Burgs and I are chatting about the wealth strategy update, how our journey has changed and now what we're looking to invest in, how we think about growing our wealth. What are we doing with our money? What are we planning to do? This was triggered by a conversation we had in our team last week. We sat down and started to map out like our three to five year goals, which is always an interesting thing when you start to figure out how much money you need. What do you want? You know, what do you need? What do you actually want? Is that real? Do you really need that and ever.

Thought this through or did you see it on YouTube because you saw a guy that's in significant debt masking as a billionaire on a plane.

Why do you want it? Oh, actually I don't want that.

So I guess, you know, I'll start and preface this by saying like Bergs and I are in different, I guess, you know, life journeys, stages of our life where I'm far more in this and have been for the last nine years. Far more risk on wealth concentrated. I've gone all in on my business, nearly lost everything number of times got into crypto early, sold a lot of it to build my business, then nearly lost the business and now the business is going good and now being able to build that wealth back up again just to go essentially for not having pretty much anything when I started eight or nine years ago and now being know, maybe asset rich, cash poor and then starting to get more cash, starting to figure out where you invest that, what do you do with it. You know, I'm on a really good salary now. Where does that go? You know, where does that get positioned? You get taxed a lot. There's so many different things that you learn about as, as, you know, you go through this, you know, wealth creation stage and for me now it's more about how do I optimize like on the majority owner of my business, which spits off cash? How much do you reinvest back in the business? How much do you take out? What do you do with that money? And I've brought up until this point in time, really, really continued to double down. We reinvest everything. The only money we really take out is salaries. And for a couple of years, I wasn't even taking.

No, I wasn't taking a salary. I was just getting repaid money that I put in as my wage to sort of pay for things. And now it's like, well, where do you put that money? And for me, my ultimate strategy to this point has been about wealth concentration. Like you to, to create wealth faster, you concentrate it. And I've concentrated that primarily in crypto now. And, and for essentially six years, I've been driven off, like, fear and worried about not having any money and also losing everything and, you know, just trying to get the break even and just trying to, like, live. And now, like, I'm at a stage where I've got money or money's coming in. The fear is now the fear of losing it.

Now your problems start, mate.

Now your problems start. And it's, it's a different, it's quite different feeling. But there's, you know, we've got 19, 20 employees now. Like, you know, you've got lifestyle creep. You've got all these different things that you think about. They're like, if you lost that, how would you, you know, manage? And, you know, now it's about like, how can we really lay the foundations? How can I now start to diversify my wealth, my business and my assets are all in crypto. Like, that's 100% correlated with one asset class. I want to now diversify. My first piece of that strategy is buying mum and dad a house, which I'm in a process of doing now, which is really exciting. But then beyond that, it's like, what am I optimizing for? You optimizing for cash, you're optimizing for income, you're optimizing for diversification, like what asset class you're diversifying to. And, you know, even this property journey burgs like going into that very fresh, the property market. Like, just like crypto. There's so many nuances, so many people telling you different things. Everyone so much, all of its horseshit just. Just smells and feels like crypto, where everyone's just an expert, but no one's got an actual clue.

So it's nonsense, isn't it? It's like, it's one of the easiest things on the planet there's a couple of gotchas, but mate, so many shysters.

Out there, it's crazy. And then, you know, do you negatively gear, do you positively gear? How much do you put down as a posit, what bank do you go to which, which area do you buy, how much you charge rent? Do you do Airbnbs? Do you do like when you're first coming in? That's a lot, you know, and I've spoken to a lot of people. You know, you're obviously very successful in the property space. I've paid for advice. I've joined a couple of platinum collectorship, platinum esque groups for property. I love that. Right. I kind of pay and learn from other people and then it fast tracks my experience. It's what we do at collective shift for crypto. But you know, now I'm doing for property as an example. It's been a fascinating experience. But, you know, long story short, now I'm looking to diversify first in a property. Negatively gearing a couple of properties is probably going to be the goal because I've got quite a high salary. Every dollar I earn above that, you know, I mean, I laugh at negative.

Gearing where it's like I lose a dollar and I get 45 cents back. Or if you structure properly, I, I lose a dollar and I get 25 cents back.

It's interesting because I won't even be the negative gearing isn't a priority because I'm actually doing it under a trust structure to begin with. So I can't even offset that with my personal income. It's just for future dividends that I'll take out in the, in the trust structure.

But just straight P and L. Yeah, because you're going for capital growth. Right. But you need, you need enough cash flow to keep you in the game.

Yeah. The negative gearing isn't, is the actual issue. It's more about just being able to service the service the loans. And the trust structure is a good way to do that. And then also still gives me the 50% capital gains discount down the line if I was to ever sell it. But, you know, that's the way I'm doing it. And then beyond that, cash isn't really the problem right now. It's more about diversifying and protecting wealth than like trying to generate income. And I know a lot of people are now going to like retirement and trying to set themselves up for, you know, income, but I'm not, that's not my goal right now.

Yeah, I think you're in the, definitely in the capital growth phase. Right. Where your income sorted from your wage in the company. So you've got enough money but you need to grow the money that you do have and the surplus money as well. So focusing heavily on capital growth over a certain amount of years and eventually that will change. Right. Because you have significant life things like you may get married, have a child, you want to buy a house. All those are quite cash intensive.

Yeah. So right now, you know, I'm rent vesting, you know, just really grateful to be able to be in a really nice house right now that I don't know what it'd be worth on the market. My bill was trying to figure it out the other day.

The.

I don't know what it was. Somewhere in the 2 to 3 mil. Yeah, somewhere there I think, you know, I pay. What do I pay in rent? I can't remember. It's, it's the rent, although is structured in a way where I'm able to like I've got a home office as well so I can utilize that so I can, you know, have some of the tax come back on, on the, on on the home office. But the point is that rather than me going out and buying a home occupied property, if I was to do that, my serviceability would be way, way down to be able to start to diversify in a property because I'm using post tax income to pay the mortgage down. And my ultimate goal right now is not stability and home occupied property. It will be when I have, you know, kids one day. But for now it's more an aggressive diversification strategy which allows me to service higher debt by renting, if that makes sense.

Yeah. And if, if we pair it right back like they're the tactical things that you're doing, but the actual goals you want to fulfill freedom, not be locked in and have high liquidity.

Yeah.

So you have choice.

Yeah.

Right. Because we did go down this path where it's like do we buy an office for the company or do you buy a house or do you do this and you don't know where you're going to be in a few. And having that freedom is worth a lot more than locking yourself into a massive property, which a lot of people do. And they're like, well shit, now I'm stuck and now I need to service it and I'm with this partner and we require dual incomes. Well, we may as well get married and we may as well do this. And your choice set is reduced by the decisions that you make and sometimes your hand is forced because the counter of those choices is quite difficult. So they're the kind of. I'm always wary about like what prison amount building for myself.

Yeah, I like that.

And it's like, think a few years ahead of you. Oh, it's fine now, but yeah, but all these things might happen. This is how lives generally go and what people generally do. And if you think about why they generally do it, you're like, ah, that's because you wanted this thing. You're now locked in, it's around your neck. The average salary is this.

Yeah.

And you can see why people go on a certain life trajectory, which is perfectly fine if that's what you want. But if you want that flexibility and freedom and choice start to make different structural decisions.

Yeah, and yeah, that's a good point. Going back to my goals, my ultimate three to five year goal is to just be free of time, location and what I do every day. That's the ultimate goal for me. Like I don't want to be tied down to one thing, I don't want to be tied down to things I don't want to do. I want to be able to go anywhere, do whatever I want. And you know, that's actually, well, contextually not that much money. Like I remember when we first started collective shift, I was like, right, billion dollars or nothing. But now it's more about doing what I love every day. Wealth for me is time, freedom and passion. And I think something that I'm very, very grateful to have found at my age is something that I love doing, which is business, which, with something that I'm really good at. And I also love, which is crypto, which is the economic value. So I've got passion and economic value combined equals like for me, the best thing that I could be doing. Because I think.

Like a lot of people struggle to find that what that passion is and what they love doing every day. And for me, being able to do what I do I absolutely love. And the economic driver behind it allows me to invest, diversify and then ultimately try and be, you know, time and location free. That's the, that's the big goal and.

That'S, that's the fundamental difference where you're at freedom to. And I'm freedom from. So your freedom to have a car, have a house, go on a holiday, to take some time off to run your business however you want. And I'm freedom from. Which is what you're working towards, where it's freedom from having to go to work from having someone holding your balls, from having your time controlled, from having to do things. I get to choose what I want to do. Right. Obviously, there's consequences for those choices. And if I decide, like, you know, I don't like what's happening, I'll, you know, quick collective shift or something like that. But then there's consequences. I don't have a job, and I'll have to, you know, figure it out, work on my investments, maybe aggress, invest more aggressively, but I have that freedom from. And that's what you're working towards as well. Yeah. And the good thing about us is that we work on our goals together as a company. The three executives. What do you want to achieve in your life? Can the company do this? Does the company need to change in order to fulfill those future lives? And then we monitor those as well, so. So we make sure we're getting what we need out of the business. Because at the end of the day, we're in business to have the lives that we want. And if a business is not providing that, something needs to change.

Yeah, totally agree. So that's kind of where I'm at, you know. And, you know, the way I am able to do that primarily is from my crypto investments, my crypto growth. I use cash flow from the business to grow the crypto. You can then sell down that, whether it be, you know, through the maple investment I made, you know, that's kind of primarily helped me, you know, start to work on mom and dad's house. Um, you know, there's.

Get that depreciation going, son. Let's go. Let's go build to build some equity, mate.

So, yeah, cheap capital, I think. But I think the big thing for me that has allowed me to get to where I am now is risk. Like, I've taken a lot of risk to get to where I am. Like, I put everything I have, My. My. My lifetime of like. Like, sorry time over the last nine years, like, my 100% dedication, all of my. The money that I had, I took. We were in the negative for a long time. You know, whether it be raising other money, equity. My crypto investments. I'd sold my crypto investments to fund the business. I was in debt with the government. Like it was all in. Like it was. And it was weeks away from failing, number of times. And I think that is, like, the risk that if you get and if it wins and you can pay it off, the reward comes really quickly. And that has happened. It's funny, we're talking about the other day, like where we're at, even as a business, to get to seven figures a month in revenue. I think 0.1% of businesses get to 10 million a year. And you only hear the 0.1% of stories. Like, you don't hear, you don't hear the. What is that? Is it 100,1999 other stories of. No, it's more than that, isn't it? Ten hundred. Yeah, thousand.

Don't worry about public math.

It's a majority, but you don't hear about everyone else. And that's the kind of scary, you know, thing. There was a number of times I questioned what the hell am I doing?

We hear about the exception, not the rule.

Yes. Yeah. And yeah, anyway, long story short, very grateful to be where I'm at. But also, this is not an overseas overnight success over sex overnight success. And, and people that think that I'm like, I forget about all the stories and all the pain and suffering and literally like, you know, that we've been through to get here, that I had to go through to make this shit happen. Like, this is.

Remember being locked in your apartment during COVID building the website with Filipino developers that couldn't speak English. Are you just adding more $8 developers every day?

The, the most pain honestly was losing. We were losing 100, $510,000 a month of money that I couldn't afford to lose with no actual visible sight of how I was going to fix. Like, I knew tactically what I was doing, but there was no confidence anymore with the amount of losses we had. Like, like, like business losses in terms of like tactically, everything we're doing, marketing, product, it just felt nothing was working. FTX blew up. Crypto was going down. We were losing customers. We laid off half our team and.

We celebrated when we got a $100 a month customer, one customer, and I.

Owe the government hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was like, cool, this is going to be, you know, bankruptcy. Sweet. Cool. It's going to be great story.

Cool story, bro. Like, that's it, Rip.

So that's what I remember. And you know, yeah, but that's, that's one angle that's like.

Yeah, because you're, you're also doing something that a lot of people don't do and it's focusing on your personal wealth and not always going to the business for money. Because a lot of business owners go hard in their business. My business is doing well. I've got a lot of equity in there. That's where I'LL get my money from. And they don't focus on themselves and they don't think, hey, what if my business went away in four months, what could I afford? And they don't have that dual thing or a lot of people personally that don't have businesses rely on their superannuation, they don't start to think, what if something happens in the market? What if the super gets garnished? What if, what if I need to access it and I can't because it's later in life. So you start to build your own super fund by investing and this is the equivalent of you've got your super, you've got your business and now you're investing as well, and all of those little automations and investments will work for you long term and generate wealth.

Yeah. And that's something you told me really, that automation and like moving money and like, I literally forgot about, you know, I take 25, 30%, I can't remember of my income every week and it goes into a different bank account that I don't, like, I don't see regularly. And loaded up the other day, I'm like, oh, what the fuck? Like, this is the most amount of savings I've had in, in like forever. Like, because I never was all about automation, I wasn't thinking about diversifying, it was all on one thing. But like, having that automation of investing and separating things is a really, you know, boring but like rapid way to like grow your investments or your savings. So that's been a big, that's a big lesson.

That's it, man. And it's very rare where you can just set something up and forget about it and it just works for you over time.

Yeah.

Like all the things worth achieving you kind of have to do, like, you've got to work on your relationships, you've got to work on your body, you've got to work on your mental health every day. Yeah. Your food, whatever it may be. But with this, it's literally just set it up once, go to sleep, wake up rich in five, ten years.

So good.

So, and then I guess for me, where I'm at the freedom from stage, I've got this Venn diagram and for me it's money, time and experiences and all those together give me freedom. If I've only got money and time, I've got fear. So I've got no growth and I'm stagnant, stagnant. If I've only got money and experiences, someone's holding my balls because I don't have Time to actually spend that money. Right. And if I've got time and experiences.

Yeah, I got time and experiences. I'm living less of a life because I don't have money to fund everything that I want to do. So I've got time. I can go mountain bike riding but I can't go on a holiday is essentially what it is. So I need all three of those to have freedom within my life. And I think for me the big, big updates in terms of portfolio is I've still got my project primary place of residence, investment property, still holding a bunch of cash because I like to have a significant amount of cash. So don't have to worry. I've got, you know, more than a year to kind of figure it out of living expenses. And I think the biggest change for me is just going from probably changing over my super. I've said this for a while, haven't actioned it yet, but changing it from investing in high growth shares to changing it over to crypto. And I like that because that's something long term that I won't really touch. Something that I probably won't even need, but it has huge growth potential and I'd rather do that in a facility I can't access but need it in the future if it's there, rather than invest super heavily in crypto with my personal money and have to stomach downswings and everything like that. That being said, I believe in crypto so heavily I'm invest in it, I invest in it personally anyway. But just balancing out those portfolios, it just makes sense that it doesn't really carry any risk of ruin for me. Like if something catastrophic was to happen, I'd rather that on the super side than on my personal side because I can access that now and I've got more control.

Yeah, yeah, totally. I like that. And also like you've been, you know, with the cash and you, you know, generally speaking, from my knowledge anyway, like, you know, you always sit with a pretty nice, you know, comfy emergency fund cash position, you know, for a rainy day. And now being able to access and just look at bitcoin as like, well, this is just a no brainer and you can start to accumulate that now and take advantage of dips and whatever else and yeah, really, really easy way of investing, to be honest.

Exactly right. And then so the, the other thing is that my investments are a point now where it does cover my living expenses, which is just really, really nice. And then I think from my wage, so my wife works part time and Then the wage I get from Collective shift and everything from there that just goes towards more experiences and more investing and then as I build up all of those investments, I guess I'll decide what I want to do. So whether that's like I'm really passionate about wealth coaching so I might just start a business not for profit, doesn't have to make any money and then just teach people all this stuff because people deserve to know. We don't get taught it in schools. Make me feel really fulfilled and I get to help out a bunch of people. So saving up a bunch of money and then I'll use it for that.

I love it. And also, yeah so on even on that thing like you, you're yeah. Phenomenal in the, in the wealth creation stuff and you know, Bergs actually speaks it, you know, even at the Platinum Day in Melbourne, like, you know, speaking more about wealth and wealth creation, like, you know, structurally thinking about how to grow your wealth tax positioning different things like it's stuff that we're really working on in Collective shift because once you've become crypto or rich in crypto or you've got a lot of money in crypto, it's like, well now what, what do you do with it?

Well, that's it because people come to us and we help them on the crypto side but they don't know about, you know, tax or legal structures or whatever. So we'll connect them with our tax partner. We're like, okay, you've got this, like this, this is the future state you want to achieve. You need to speak to a tax person or hey, you've got all this stuff going on and you want to go to get domiciled somewhere else. Like that's not our area. Go speak to this lawyer and like them with the people that they need to achieve their goals in their life or hey, I'm later on in life and I'm not going to be working in three years and I need more income. All right, great. Crypto can do these things. It can't do these things. You might need to consider another asset class. Go speak to a financial advisor. So just understanding where you're at in life and understanding that the preferences you have today and the things that are going on might not be the preferences you have in a year, two, three, four, five from now. So just set yourself up, don't restrict yourself too much, give it a red hot go and then just get after it.

Love it, love it. If you want to hear more about Berg's story and the wealth strategies and stuff. The Platinum is the area where we talk about and help people that are already wealthy or growing their wealth through crypto. Not only how to grow your crypto and then how to grow other assets and move it into those things structurally to think about more wealth creation. Now, obviously not stock experts or anything like that, but we're more talking just general wealth creation and, you know, so many lessons learned and even having, like, what are we up to? 250 other Platinum clients that are also wealthy talk about their experiences and what they're doing. Like, so, so cool.

And it's interesting. Like, not one person has all the pieces to the puzzle. Like, I'm still learning a lot of stuff. And you see people that are really, really wealthy and you're like, oh, you missed this fundamental thing. Like, go sort it out, mate. And they're like, oh, fuck, I didn't know that. My advisors didn't tell me about it. And you don't know until you're around like people that have similar experiences to you, that have been through it and you get to learn from their mistakes and you don't have to pay the bill because you can sort it out before it happens to you.

Yeah, totally. So one of, one of the big benefits of, of our Platinum program is that twice a year you get a ticket to both events, middle of the year and end of the year. So we've got one in Sydney coming up in November and then also one in Miami that's coming up in October in person. Strategy workshop where we bring in guest speakers, we bring in the experts. Bergs will be there in Sydney, I'll be there in both Miami and Sydney where we talk about these things. And you can learn from the other Platinum clients as well, which is so cool. So if you are wanting and you know, wanting that peer group, that network, you're thinking more about wealth, you're thinking about how to structure these things and you want to be in a room of these people. I'd really, really recommend checking out our Platinum program. We'll put the links in the bio. You can check out our training video, it's completely free. Or you can just check out the Platinum program. Have a call. But it's, yeah, really benefit.

Yeah, it is. And it's hard to find crypto people, let alone crypto people at your level or even if you're a wealthy person, you're just dipping your toe in the water with crypto. We've signed up a lot of those people recently where they're like, hey, I've heard about this crypto thing, lost a bunch of money or it's bullshit and I don't understand it. How do I get this going? And working for me and then talking to your peers at that level is just a beautiful thing.

So good. So if you're interested, you click the link below. There's a free training where I go through 20 minutes of insights of like growing your crypto portfolio. Then at the end I talk about the Platinum program. Or you can just apply. You can book a call and you can talk to one of our team to see how it all looks and feels. But hopefully you enjoyed this episode. Thank you again for listening in. You can share it around with a friend or family member if you enjoyed it, if you think someone else will find value in it. Otherwise, we'll see on the next episode. Thank you. Bugs.