2024 Financial Freedom Hacks feat. Joey Mure

We exist because we learned that there's certain hacks along the way to getting to financial freedom that people need to know about. Putting money in a 401k and then seeing that money just disappear because somebody tweeted something stupid across the world that had nothing to do with me, that was an uncertainty, and it just didn't feel right. But I didn't know the alternative.

For you, it's all about income, passive income, cash flow. So you really set out on a journey to how do I go start to create cash flow that I can have coming in without me having to work harder to get more of it, right? And using my assets to produce cash flow or businesses or side hustles.

Dude, we've got all this capital. We need to start creating passive income immediately.

Welcome back to another episode of the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. I am your host, Ben Frazier, and today, very excited for this conversation with a good bud of mine, Joey Mure. He is one of the founders of Wealth Without Wall Street. You've probably seen seen these guys around. They're all over the internet and podcast world and have been around a long time helping passive investors really navigate the world of investing, creating cash flow. Amazing educators, put on amazing events. I've been to some of these. If you're not in their world or ecosystem, you got to. So I think you'll hear the reasons why once Joey starts talking. Super excited to have them on. We had them on before, really knew we had to get them back on. They just wrote a new book and we're going to talk about that today. This is the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast, where we uncover the alternative investments and strategies that billionaires use to grow wealth. The tools and tactics you'll learn from this podcast will make you a better investor and help you build legacy wealth. Join us as we dive into the world of alternative investments, uncover strategies of the ultra-wealthy, discuss economics, and interview successful investors. So, Joey, thanks for coming on, man.

Man, always a pleasure. This is being with my people, man. This is so good.

I love it. I know when we first kind of got connected, we're talking about some of the main things we're talking about in our podcast, education. And, you know, it's like it was so aligned. It's like they were basically saying the same thing. You know, a few different ways. And, you know, just since then it's been awesome. But love what you guys are doing. Wealth Without Wall Street, a very powerful concept, a great, great education platform you guys have built. For those that maybe don't know you and Russ or Wealth Without Wall Street, give a little background for kind of how you got into this world. What are you really doing, you know, in your education? What are you trying to help? Investors do and to talk about the kind of journey and the story there.

Great, great question. And I'll tell you, we exist because we learned that there's certain hacks along the way to getting to financial freedom that people need to know about. In fact, I was in the corporate grind in the mortgage business for 11 years, and I saw that corporate ladder before me, and it was something I was running hard after. Thinking that like retirement and corporate ladder was the answer. And what I found is a higher active income did not equal freedom, and it didn't give me more of what I wanted my lifestyle to look like. And even second to that, which I mean, some people would say it's even the primary deal, is I realized that I had abdicated one of the largest things and gifts that the Lord had given me, And that was my own stewardship of the assets that God was giving me. Like the money in my life, I was passing on to other people and not really taking control of that function. And that, that didn't sit well with me. It always felt weird, right? Like putting money in a 401k and then seeing that money just disappear because somebody tweeted something stupid across the world that had nothing to do with me. Like that was an uncertainty and it just didn't feel right. And, but I didn't know the alternative until like really these certain things came into my life. And then I was like, okay, I'm compelled. Like I need to get this out. I need to get other people on board with this.

Yeah. I love that. And so for you, it was really, it was all about income, passive income, cash flow. And so you really set out on a journey to how do I go start to create cash flow that I can have coming in without me having to work harder to get more of it, right? And using my assets to produce cash flow or businesses or side hustles. So talk about that kind of journey, because like where you guys started to where you're at now, you know, is pretty incredible. Number one. But I also think it's so cool how you guys have kind of forged this path in a lot of ways for people that are just like you, that are, you know, they're in the grind. They're working the W-2, they're making a lot of money, but you know, the tax man's taking half of it or close to it. And they feel like they can't get ahead because the lifestyle keeps inflating, you know, family's growing or whatever it is, inflation's eating away the value of the dollar. You know, talk about kind of where you guys started and like, what was that process and journey and to get to where you're at now?

Yeah. And such a great observation is that, um, there was a lot of people like me just thinking that financial success had to do with active income. And, but what if you really think about it, what do we really want more than anything? It's time. And it's not just time, it's quality of that time. Because if I, like, if you pull out your calendar right now, as Ben and I are talking about this, you pull out that calendar and you look at it, the vast majority of your time is filled with someone else's agenda for you. Like, let that sink in for a second, right? I am, I am having to be somewhere at a certain time because I don't own that time. And the only way— and this is not a new idea by Russ and Joey at Wealth Without Wall Street, this is a Robert Kiyosaki method, this is a Bob Fraser method, right? It's if I have more passive income, then I have monthly expenses, I immediately can dictate what goes on that calendar. Until that point, there is, I am, I am having to put things on that calendar that I don't want to do or don't have the choice not to. And, and that's a key takeaway that it kind of hit me like a thunderbolt one time. I was taking my little 3-year-old, she's now 9, at the time she was 3. I was taking her to this pre-K and she's sitting in the back seat and she's like, Dad, you gonna pick me up today? And I was like, I was thinking to myself, you know, no, of course not. Like I've gotta be at work, right? And I said, no, I've gotta be at work today, this afternoon. She says, why do you have to work? And I said, well, we have— I have to pay for this car, like I have to pay for our house, I have to pay for the food that we eat. She said, well, we already have a car, we already have a house. You know, like these are the simple things she's saying, but I don't know about you, in my— the back of my head I'm thinking, I just told my daughter I have to go to work because I don't have options. Like, I don't have, I don't have other cash flow coming in. That's my dollars working harder than me. And so I am the asset. I, only me and my time are being traded for dollars. And immediately I went home and I was like, or actually went to the office after that. And I told Russ, I was like, dude, we've got all this capital. We need to start creating passive income immediately, right? We have to get out of this rat race, this grind of not having options. Now, thankfully, we love what we do, being able to educate the world, but we want to have less and less of our time required of us to do it. And that's what we've been able to do, right? Since 2020, we went from reporting to the world $2,500 a month in passive income between the two of us That's two dudes reporting $2,500 a month. I know this sounds pathetic, but it was like, let's put it out there on Front Street and hold ourselves accountable to within two years after that, over $50,000 a month in passive income. And that's, that's where the game changer occurred is when all those things started to click. We're like, man, there's a process that we went through to get here. Now let's start showing the world How to make that even faster because we learned the hard way. Let's help them learn the easy way.

Yeah. No, I love that. I think so much of it is just you don't even know it's an option, right? Because you're taught by the system, this is the way you do it. You got to wait until you're 62 and a half before you can even touch the retirement. You've been saving up for 30 or 40 years. That's just the way it is because everyone does that. But in 2 years, you just said you went from $2,500 a month to $50,000 a month in passive cash flow, meaning that if you worked more or worked less, that number didn't change a whole lot. That's crazy.

Well, and what we found is it's not that hard to do if you know what steps to take, right? And that's really, I know that you mentioned our book Wealth Without Wall Street: 3 Steps to Freedom Through Passive Income. It's a bestseller on Amazon. And we're going to actually give people opportunity to buy that if they want on the show. But we break it down into a GPS model, right? There's 3 steps, GPS. And it's not an uncommon analogy. You know, people use that quite a bit. Probably, it's probably a little played out, to be honest, but, but we went with it anyway, because if you have your goal, that's your G, that leads to having a plan, that's the P, and then to gaining support along the way is the S. So GPS, goal, plan, support. If you literally hold up your Maps app on your phone right now, and I don't know if you've ever done this, you've been like in the middle of the desert or like in a place where there's really terrible cell signal, and you pull up that Maps app and it can't find you on the map. Has that ever happened to you?

Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You're like, I mean, I don't know about you. I'm become so dependent on that thing. I'm like, I don't even know where to go right now. Like, this is so ridiculous. But that's kind of like the person that has just been buying financial products and expecting to get to some sort of destination. It literally, you haven't even stopped. To take inventory of where you're at. So how can you possibly know what the next step is going to be to get to your end goal? Right. So that goal plan— or excuse me, that goal portion of this, knowing where you're at right now, knowing what you're going to do when you're financially free is the second part. And so we help people to dream again, right? Like, You need to figure out, man, who am I going to be when I'm financially free? What am I going to do? And what am I going to have? What would it look like right now if I pulled up that calendar and I was putting actively things on that calendar that I wanted to do? Who would I be spending time with? What would I be doing with my time that I'm not able to do today? And if you can get really clear on that, then, then and only then can you start to really organize your finances. Because let's face it, somebody can tell you right now, Ben, man, I really love what my 401 has been doing last year because, you know, it came in at 15%. It was a great, it was a great year for me. And you could say, well, that's awesome. Well, what, what's, what are you trying to accomplish with that? Well, you know, eventually I'd like to be financially free, like in the next few years. Well, that's great, but how old are you? Well, I'm 35. I got bad news for you, Ben. Your 401 is going to be the worst place that you can put money if that's your goal. Wait a minute, you just— I just told you it's earning 15%. Like, this is a great place for me to put money, right? Well, it's a great place for money to be locked up until you're 59 and a half.

Yep.

And if you want to be free in the next 5 years, I got news for you. This place, it doesn't matter what the rate of return is. The internal rate of return has nothing to do with your ability to become free in the next 5 years. And the vast majority of people that come and work with our team at Wealth Without Wall Street, they have this light bulb moment. Like, Whoa, wait a minute, I've been looking at the wrong thing because I didn't have a clear idea of where I'm at today and where I'm headed. And now all of a sudden it's become clear where I should be putting money.

I love that. I mean, I think there's like multiple layers of this too, right? Because one is even knowing what the goal could be, like you're just saying, of like, hey, I actually don't have to go the same path that everyone else is going. I've been taught is the only way, which is wait until I'm you know, in the latter part of my life before I can actually enjoy the money that I've worked so hard for. But I see the same thing too. Once you kind of see the options of things outside of Wall Street, like investing in real estate, investing in, you can see a lot of short-term rentals and whole life banking policies and a lot of these cool things that you can create assets with. They're not all created equal, right? And I think so many people get hooked on the big number, the big return, the IRR or the equity multiple. And that's not bad, but you can't live off of equity multiple, right? You can't live off of IRR because mostly, most of IRR in most deals comes at the very end of the deal if all the parameters were hit, right? And so I think you're kind of taking even another level down of like, Okay, yeah, here's all the options that you have within the whole world outside of Wall Street, which is really exciting, but there's a whole other way to think about it and understand if your goal is to get financial freedom and to have time freedom, the only way you do that is with actual cash flow hitting your bank account every month, right? And those can be very different things and it kind of shifts the plan of action. So kind of walk us through the kind of steps here. So goal, plan, support. How do you kind of put this in a real-world example for someone that's kind of in that boat of maybe they've already been looking at alternative investments, they made a few, but it wasn't exactly what they expected or it's not producing that much passive income and it's like, well, I thought this was supposed to solve my problems, right?

Yeah, yeah. Great point. And I think if you, we've broken down what's in that goal phase. You know, just being very clear on who you are, where you're at right now, where you want to be. And I think the plan then starts to be clear on where am I currently putting money and is it getting me closer to or further away from financial freedom? You start thinking about the, the 3 big killers. I'll just tell you, these are the things we constantly see people doing that they stop doing once they get clear on their goal. Qualified plans are a no-no, right? Putting money in those things is literally locking up your financial freedom future. It is keeping you away from that. Second thing, paying off debts unnecessarily. Like I can tell you for sure, there's plenty of people that are doctors that have gotten just inundated with debt to get to where they're at. And then they look up and they say, man, I can't do anything until I get this debt paid off. And they may be staring down $500,000 in student loan debts. And you know what they do? They make all this money and then they start taking extra, every extra dollar and they put it towards paying off that, that debt. And they try to do it, oh man, the next 5 years, the next 10 years, I'm just going to do everything I can to pound this debt. When in actuality, if I've had— I've heard this from multiple doctors. So this is not just Joey's opinion. If they had taken the extra dollars and just bought a single-family rental property, I'm talking about not even the things that you guys have at your fingertips that are much better than this. I'm talking about just a, just a plain Jane single-family residence. And they bought one every time that they had you know, $50,000 available to buy that next property as a down payment, they would be so much closer to financial freedom at the end of the same timeframe. Like, so just, it's hard to do over audio, but I'll just do my best. Let's say that your student loan balance is like, let's say the, the payment on it is supposed to be $1,000 a month. Okay. I don't know. Just using, just bear with me here. And you start to say, you know what, I'm going to pay $3,000 a month towards that to just get it paid off as fast as possible. So instead, this is the alternative. I'm going to say take the extra $2,000 and start putting it somewhere where you can then invest from. I'm going to recommend Infinite Banking because that's what we did. And it's by far, it's what the banks have done at the highest of levels. It makes the most sense. We can talk more about that if you want, but that's going to be the place I'm going to park it. As soon as I have enough cash in that place, I'm going to then leverage it into real estate of some sort, which we'll get into that in a second. As far as like where you should invest, because it's all dependent on you. It's not dependent on what Ben and I say. It's all dependent on you and your, your investor DNA. But you start taking that cash flow and you, and you create a new asset, wherever that is, it starts creating cash flow. At some point, it's going to more than dwarf the $1,000 a month that your student loans, uh, you know, monthly payment are. Like that minimum monthly payment's $1,000. Your cash flow from that, those other assets are going to dwarf that $1,000 a month. And so if you're keeping score at passive income greater than monthly expenses, this is how it works. And let's just say in 10 years I look up and I, I could have paid off the $1,000 a month, but I have no passive income. What is my financial freedom score at that point? I have zero passive income and I've lowered my debts by $1,000 a month. I'm still at 0%. Right, right. I'm no closer in a percentage to financial freedom. I just have a lesser expense. But if I've been able to create, let's say, $2,000 a month, even just on the low end of passive income, then I am that much closer to financial freedom. Let's say my total debts are $10,000. I'm now 20% of the way to financial freedom because I started buying assets that created cash flow. Instead of paying extra on that debt. So I know that's a word salad I probably just threw out, but just to help people to get their head around, man, you gotta, don't just pay off debt to pay off debt. Like be smart about it because you have a new way to keep score with this passive income greater than monthly expenses. And then the last cash flow killer I'll just throw out is by giving up the compounding of all your cash, by paying cash for everything, right? There's a reason why the richest of the rich use leverage in most everything that they do, right? Robert Kiyosaki, he talks about this regularly, so I'm not out of line. He says, I'm a billion dollars in debt. But there's a reason he's got that much debt is because he has that much more in assets that he's been able to leverage to get those assets. I'm not saying go into debt unnecessarily. I'm not saying to be, you know, wild and crazy about it, but man, quit paying cash for everything because you're losing the opportunity that those dollars could have earned. And so those are my top 3 cash flow killers. Once you get those clear, now you start saving a lot more than what you're used to, and then you can move on to the next step of investing those dollars wisely.

Hmm, man, that's so good. I mean, you said a few things there and, you know, we've talked about this in other conversations and webinars we've done in the past, but it's a pretty simple equation, right? It's like the passive income greater than monthly expenses. And I remember, I mean, I've heard that so many times, but even hearing you break it down, you know, one of the workshops you guys did last year, like it was, it's so powerful, right? Because it is so simple that I think we try to overcomplicate it. Right? Where no, it's gotta be more than that. It's gotta be, you know, but no, it's as simple as if you have passive income that exceeds your monthly expenses, you have time freedom, you have financial freedom, right? And so I think we try to overcomplicate it in, I mean, some of the things you just said are probably some pretty big trigger words for Dave Ramsey fans, right? Or people that have drank the Dave Ramsey Kool-Aid, you know, what is it? Don't pay off all your debt and actually take out more good debt to leverage into passive income. I mean, just on that point for a minute, because I know especially with doctors, you know, there's, I mean, there's all these blogs and forums and things. People take both sides of that conversation and it's probably worth a whole podcast to talk through it and look at it. But is there a point? Is it kind of a blanket statement? You think that's what everyone should be doing, or is there— has to be a certain level of education of understanding what you're doing before you kind of say it's probably a good idea? Or, you know, because I was also arguing too, a lot of people that are making a lot of money, they have no idea what their monthly expenses are. And so, you know, they probably should deleverage a little bit. But your point is, assuming that you're making good financial decisions and you're getting a good spot, that extra $1,000 or $2,000 a month can go so much further than paying down a loan that is probably pretty low interest rate, can be deferred for a very indefinite long period of time. And there's lots of things you can do to maximize, you know, generate that. And then to the last point you made, at the end of the day, you now have passive cash flow that can pay for that entire minimum loan amount. And what I've seen, I mean, in the investing world, it's this kind of a cliché thing, but the power of compounding cannot be underestimated, right? Because I would assume that for you and Russ to get to, you know, $2,500 a month in passive cash flow, you know, going from 0 to 1 is actually pretty hard sometimes. I'm just getting that first kind of momentum that snowball started. But I can't imagine it was that much harder to go from 25 to 50 because now you had the roadmap, now you had, you knew what it took and you just repeated the plan over and over and over and over again. And you know, to, to get to that point, get the snowball rolling and building on itself, because you're compounding it, is actually a much more powerful concept than, than just paying down debt that reduces your, your cash outflows, but it's not building an asset that actually produces cash flow on its own.

100%. Yeah. And just to address another kind of commonly missed thing when it comes to debt, think about what options it gives you. Okay? If I'm taking, I just use that example of the, the minimum payment's $1,000 a month and I'm paying $3,000. If I'm doing that consistently every single month and I'm paying that down to the student loan company and a year goes by, That means I've put an extra $24,000 towards that loan to pay it down faster. Correct? Well, let's say at the end of that year, you're like, man, I really could use $20 grand for fill in the blank. Life happened, you know, the AC went out, uh, you know, fill in the blank. There's a ton of things that could be $20,000. And you go to that student loan company and say, hey, I just need to get that extra $20,000. I paid you extra. Could you just wire me back $20K? I'm a little light, right, this month. What's the chance? Like, what are they going to say?

Like, tough luck.

You transferred ownership of those dollars to us, right? They're no longer yours. Like, compare that to the doctor or whomever who's paying that extra into an account that they own and control. Okay, so I'm, so let's just say apples to apples. I'm paying $1,000 towards the student loan and I pay the extra $2,000 into my infinite banking system. That again, I, that's my recommendation. And I go and I have the same issue. I can go access those, that $20,000 for whatever the purpose is that I need without having to interrupt that whole, that loan paydown. Or at the same time I would've paid off the student loan by paying extra, I have that amount of cash sitting over here on the sideline. I could choose to pay off the loan in full if I wanted to. If that was the wise decision at that time, I could look up in 5 years or 10 years and I could take all that excess capital and pay it down on the loan and pay it off just as fast. But what does it do? It gives me options because let's say, and you made a great point and I want to make sure people are listening to this. You have this kind of, this thought process like, I'm not an investor like you, Ben. I don't know what to do with the money. So it just seems right to just pay off this debt first and then figure out what to do after that. But what, what we found is for the people that will invest in themselves by learning, like going through a coaching class, going through joining a mastermind, getting like— we're actually talking about the S part of the GPS, the support. Getting around other people, becoming a better investor is a process. It doesn't happen overnight. So what if I was giving myself options the whole time by putting that excess money into a place that I own and control and I can access at any time. And then I look up and let's say it took me 3 years and I was making some small investments and maybe I, maybe I botched a couple of them. You know, like, I mean, I don't know about you, you probably interviewed hundreds of people and I don't know, I've done 500+ episodes. I've not heard one person who is super successful at anything that never messed up, that never lost money in investing, right? They— we all have those stories. What if you invested in yourself over the course of 3 years and you made some mistakes along the way, and then you, as you pointed out, you hit it, you got that first, that first big win, and you're like, I get it now. Because then what happens from $2,500 to $50,000 a month is all it is is just rinse and repeat. It's stacking. We call it learn, build, stack. If you learn it first, then you build something, you might have to build it a couple times, and then you start to stack it. And then it just is a flywheel that continues to kick out that cash flow. It is worth the mistakes along the way. It's worth the time investment. It's worth getting in the right rooms. Like all those things make you the steward and the investor that you need to become, but you can't do it without taking, there's no shortcut to that.

Man, dropping bombs, Joey. Talk a little bit.

I'm fired up, man. Let's go.

I love it. I love it. I mean, you're such a great teacher. I mean, these concepts we've all kind of heard in different ways, but to put it all together, like it's so helpful, right? I think the financial education system in general, you know, whether it's conspiracy or not, they make things really complicated, right? It's— they make it, you know, complicated where it feels like I can't figure it out, like this is beyond me, you know. I'm just good at this one thing, I'm making money, so I'm just gonna let somebody else manage it for me, right? But, you know, I say all the time, it's like people work so hard investing in their education, in their career to grow their income to a certain point. And then for whatever reason, they just hand the keys over to the kingdom to somebody else. Oh, someone else knows more than me. When you've worked really hard to earn your dollars, but you haven't worked at all to learn how your dollars can work for you. You know, it's like this really weird imbalance from that.

But it's the norm.

It's the— absolutely, absolutely.

And it's the norm because, again, our show is called Wealth Without Wall Street, and we don't like to just like completely bash them all the time, but they're, they're genius, right? They do make it complex so that you will entrust your dollars to them for as long as possible. And then They want to then inch it out to you over the last years of your life in retirement. But it's all based on a couple of thoughts. One, you're not smart enough to do it yourself. I'm an expert because I have some, some letters after my name. By the way, you should spend some time asking how they make money and how successful they are. Because if it's all based off of the fees that they get from managing your dollars, they have no ability to create income or passive income from anything else. They don't have what you want. Right.

Yep.

I mean, that's, that's a, that's a real concern. And then the other thing that this is based off of, the Wall Street mindset, is scarcity. It's how much can I possibly live off of today so that I can put as much away for the future so that when I get to that point in the future, I can live off as little as possible so I don't run out.

Yep.

Yep. Literally. I mean, if you, I'm, I'm a simple-minded guy, Ben, but I've had enough people. One time I was at the beach with my family, had my Wealth Without Wall Street swim shirt on, you know, I was looking super cool. And, uh, this older lady comes up and she's like, What's that all about? And she's talking about my shirt, you know, the logo. I was like, well, this is a company I have, Wealth Without Wall Street, and, you know, we teach people how to create passive income and get to financial freedom. She says, huh. She's like, well, we just retired recently and, you know, I just hope it's enough. That was her, that was her, you know, this is at the beginning of her retirement journey. And what's your first thought? I hope it's enough. Yeah, there is no certainty.

Yep.

And what do you think that leads to? That leads to living the max, like, you know, all of a sudden now I can live like no one else. No, it leads to scarcity. Well, we shouldn't take that trip because you know what, that's not really in the budget. And I don't want to, you know, if I do that, wonder if that's going to make it run out. Faster.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like guys, like we got to wake up. This is not the plan that gives certainty. But if I, if I look at my bank account and I start to see $10,000 a month coming in from all these investments, $20,000 a month, whatever your number needs to be, I actually have some certainty to that right now. Nothing is perfect, right? God's the one in control. And I don't want to take anything away from that. Like we're not trying to become gods ourselves. But at the end of the day, as a steward, I want to be as wise as I can to manage the money that God's given me. And I want to see that flowing in consistently from known operators who understand how this works. And that's going to give me like the ability to have the freedom with my time. So anyway, I can, I could continue to rant on Wall Street all day. I know that's not what you have time for, but just, just, I'm just going off over here.

Love it, Joe. This is so good, man. Um, always fun to have you on the podcast. And I think you guys put together a link just for our listeners, um, wealthwithoutwallstreet.com/investlikeabillionaire. We'll put that in the show notes. And I think you have a link for the new book there. Um, I definitely encourage people, you know, if this is like ringing true with you, like get into their ecosystem. They do amazing events. I've been through several of these workshops. Shops that Joey Russ and his team lead and just really get down to the nitty-gritty of what's important. What do you have to look at? What is, how do you create a plan to get to where you want to be? And it's just, it's so powerful. So did I say the link right? Is that the right link, Joey?

Yeah, just wealthwithwallstreet.com/investlikeabillionaire. And there's even like our contact stuff. So hit me up. Always love to know where you heard us talking and always like to give back.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Joe. This is really fun, man.

Yeah, likewise.

This is the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast where we uncover the alternative investments and strategies that billionaires use to grow wealth. The tools and tactics you'll learn from this podcast will make you a better investor and help you build legacy wealth. Join us as we dive into the world of alternative investments, uncover strategies of the ultra-wealthy, discuss economics, and interview successful investors.