Invest Like a Billionaire, Best of 2023 | A Recap Special

Hello, future billionaires. Welcome to another episode of your favorite podcast, the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. Today is a little bit of a different episode. This is kind of my end of the year recap and just reflecting back on 2023 and really some of the amazing guests that we had, some of the amazing content that we were able to share. And just, it's always fun to take a step back and reflect on really what was accomplished and share some of our favorite insights. And they really look ahead. So this is a really big part of what we do here with the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. It's one of our main focuses. We put a lot of effort behind it. And so it's so awesome just to see the reception we've had from listeners. And we're just so, so grateful. So we just want to take a moment too and just really thank you all, our listeners, for making this worth doing, right? And the fact that we've had such incredible growth last year of our listener base, and our goal is just to continue to put out more content that's helpful, right? Right. And so the more feedback we get and the more that it grows, the easier it is for us to dedicate resources to make it even better. And so that's really our goal here. And we want to make it the best it can be for investors. And again, our goal is to help passive investors level up in their education on learning, you know, the best tactics and strategies that the ultra wealthy are using and apply those into our own personal financial situations, how we can level up just with our own mindsets. We can use better strategies, we can grow our wealth, we can preserve it, and really look forward to, you know, what is happening in the economy. 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. Looking for passive investments done for you? With Aspen Funds, we help accredited investors that are looking for higher yields and diversification from the stock market. As a passive investor, we do all the work for you, making sure your money is working hard for you in alternative investments. In fact, our team invests alongside you in every deal, so our interests are aligned. We focus on macro-driven alternative investments so your portfolio is best positioned for this economic environment. Get started and download your free economic report today. And so just to take a step back, it's pretty cool to look at the growth we've had. And if you listen to us on Apple or Spotify or whatever way you listen to it, also encourage you to subscribe to our YouTube channel if you haven't already, right? And vice versa. If you're on YouTube, you like watching this, be sure to subscribe on Apple and Spotify. Spotify, and it helps just to get a different experience for the different mediums. Let's make it easier to digest wherever you're at. Pretty cool. Last year we actually hit the top 1.5% of all podcasts globally. So based on the download numbers and the audience size, this has become one of the top podcasts in the world, which is kind of crazy to say because we really just started this 2 years ago just with the goal of, hey, let's just put out some content in a way that's kind of easy for us to do, just, just talking and just to help investors become better investors. And so It's been really cool to see that growth, but we're just getting started, we feel like. And there's so many things we've learned along the way. And to even look back on some of the top-listed episodes and things that we can do more of, I want to share some of those things here in a minute. But before I do, I want to take a minute just to recap some of my favorite moments of 2023. And if you haven't listened to all the episodes, I encourage you to go back and listen to some of these because we had some pretty amazing guests on last year on a variety of topics. And so one of the most listened to, actually most watched episodes. This is on YouTube, right? So we have different metrics for different channels and it's, it's kind of interesting to see which ones pick up on different channels. Some of them perform better on YouTube for whatever reason. The algorithm's different there, but it's actually Roth Conversion Secrets with my good friend Craig Weir, and he's talking about maximizing your retirement savings. And that was in April of '23 that we released that episode. If you haven't listened to that, you should definitely go listen to it. It's really a insightful episode. Just all dialoguing around converting your IRAs to Roth IRAs. And, you know, he's been doing this a long time. He's a financial advisor and has a lot of experience doing this and just creates some great parameters when you do it. And ultimately the idea is you should do it yesterday. It's kind of the idea, right?

Convert as fast as you can and as much as you can and never put another dime into a tax-deferred account unless somebody else is putting another dime with you.

What's your rationale behind that?

I've just done the math. You take that compound, you pay a little bit of tax today on your seed, and you let that grow forever, totally tax-free. And you continue to fund that seed with more tax-free money.

Whew.

Where do you think tax rates are going to be 10 years from now or 15 years from now? Are they going to be lower than today or higher?

If you can grow something tax-free, it's one of the most powerful ways to kind of build and compound wealth over time. Even if you're older. So definitely go check that out. That was a great episode. Craig's awesome. We've since worked with him a little bit, you know, in other ways outside of the podcast since that, that episode. It's been really, really cool to see the growth that he's had. Another one of our top watched episodes is another one of my good friends, Jim Doo, and he talked about how to build your own virtual family office. And that was released in July. And it's a, it's a cool concept because we've all heard of family offices, right? And most of the time think that this concept is reserved for ultra, ultra wealthy investors that can hire full-time staff that are dedicated resources just to help them manage their investment portfolio. But there's a lot of things you can do at a much smaller scale that you can build the resources around you. You get the same kind of outcomes as these family offices, but do it in a way that is for someone that does not have $100 or $200 million net worth, right? And so he talks a lot about the strategies really focused on maximizing your tax savings, thinking about the holistic picture from estate planning to, you know, transitioning your assets over time. Lots of different cool stuff there. So definitely encourage you to listen to that episode. Another one of our most top watched episodes on YouTube are our oil and gas masterclass. So we have a two-part series on that one, episode 89 and 90. Those were in June.

I think we are moving towards an electric or a power-driven economy. But what most people don't think about is how do you generate power? I think I've told you the story, maybe. And I have a great friend who lives down the street from me, bought one of these beautiful electric Mustang SUVs, and he came and picked me up and it's great. And he said, touting some of the green energy. And I told him, I said, I'm a little upset with you. And he said, why? And I said, well, you've just increased our carbon footprint on our block. And he said, well, I bought an electric-powered car. And I said, well, you realize that the majority of power in Kansas City comes from— is generated by coal. The more you're plugging in your garage, the more coal generation for power. There is oil and natural gas, particularly natural gas on the power side. The more electric cars are, the more batteries there are. It's going to take more natural gas to generate that power.

If you haven't heard us talk about oil and gas, you probably listen to too many episodes yet because we've talked about it a lot. It's an asset class, an area that we think there's a lot of opportunity in, but it's kind of not well understood. Right. There's a lot of people that I've talked with that have had bad experiences investing in this asset class. And there's a lot of landmines you got to watch out for. And so in these episodes, we really designed them to be just education 101. Here's what you got to know. Here's the things to look out for. Here's the things to pay attention to. Here's the questions to ask. Here's just an overview of what it even means. Right. So if you're interested, you kind of newer to the podcast and you haven't heard some of our content on oil and gas, definitely check that out. It's going to be very helpful just as a baseline level of information. Some of our most downloaded episodes just through Spotify and We actually just— one of our most recent released ones just a few weeks ago, Advanced Tax Saving Strategies. This is with Keystone CPA. And the timing of this just worked out really well, I guess, at the very end of the tax year. And it's a great insightful episode. We've talked a lot about different strategies kind of in a hodgepodge way across episodes about, you know, ways for passive investors to save on their taxes. And this is a great episode that kind of consolidates a lot of those thoughts and gives some really practical just ideas and advice for entrepreneurs and working professionals and real estate investors on ways to take advantage legally of the IRS tax code to pay less taxes, right? This is written into our tax code. These are ways that they have designed it for you to do so. And there are some nuances though, right? We talk about real estate professional status.

For real estate professional, I guess we'll start the rules first, right? If you're someone of higher income, higher income means $150,000 $100,000 or more of income in total, that means your rental losses, should you have any, from tax strategies are considered passive. If you have passive losses, it doesn't offset W-2 income, it only offsets other passive income. However, there's a loophole around that, which is the real estate professional loophole. What that means is if you or your spouse is a real estate professional, then your rental losses doesn't just offset passive income, but it can also be used to offset W-2 income as well. And so that's the benefit.

So nuances you got to be aware of and understand, not just big— the big picture concept of, oh yeah, I'll do that, and then not actually do the nuanced part of tracking it or whatever it is and actually not get the benefit of it. So I make sure you're doing it right. And that's where they kind of come in. Another one of our most downloaded episodes was right before that, which was one of my favorite episodes of the year, but that came at the end of the year with John Chang. So he is the chief economist at Marcus Millichap, really talking about real estate overall. Where are, you know, different asset classes right now? What are the big economic updates? So John is someone we had on the podcast before. I think probably a year and a half ago was the last time, and we just knew we had to get him back on. We spoke with him at a lot of different conferences and just a wealth of information. When you just— when he starts talking, just everything starts to make sense, right? He just has such a Great way of explaining things.

Industrial, you still have a wave of development that's in process, 400 million square feet coming online this year. I expect that next year it may come down a little bit and then in '25 we see the pace of construction really drop off. But right now there are some markets that have a lot of development. I think about half of the total square footage being added is in 8 metros. That's like Chicago, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, Inland Empire. So there are areas where you can get overdeveloped infill industrial. It looks great.

This is relevant and recent to right now, right? These are things— this is just a couple of weeks ago that we had this, this, this conversation. So download that episode, listen to it if you haven't yet. It's going to create a really great framework as we go into 2024 here for just understanding the economic landscape of where are the opportunities. Another you know, great episode that we had was really heavily downloaded, was earlier in the year, at the beginning of 2023, also focused on taxes. So, you know, that was at the beginning of last year, right after tax season. And this last was at the end of this last year, all around on taxes. And people are thinking about taxes right now. You're probably thinking about taxes. Go listen to that one as well. Another great episode with Eric Oliver talks a lot about cost segregation, how you can do that, what that means for passive investors. And then one of my favorite episodes and one of our most, most downloaded episodes was a second interview that we conducted with one of my good friends, Justin Donald. And this is a Passive Investor Spotlight. So this is one of our segments of our show. We actually interview other passive investors and really drill into what are they doing, how are they finding deals, how are they underwriting them, how are they performing due diligence, how are they tracking their portfolio over time? And we call that one Becoming a Lifestyle Investor featuring Justin Donald. He is known as The Lifestyle Investor. He wrote the book called The Lifestyle Investor, which you should read if you have not. And he's just such a wealth of information.

I really look at investing in kind of like two different genres. You kind of have two different sides of the fence. You got side number one is where you buy deeded property. You're on the hook for everything. You're managing that asset. You can hire out a property management team to do it. You're going to take less of profit when you do that. So you can either you know, really work hard to maximize the profits, or you can go the syndication route. You invest in other people's deals, you invest in other people's funds. You're going to take a reduced return because you don't own or you own a, you know, a percentage, a small percentage of it. But it's institutionally run. It's, you know, managed third party or in-house. You're paying people, you're paying professionals, not people that are learning the job on the job. These are people that are actually good already with a proven track record. And so I think you're really weighing and balancing. Are you maximizing the return or are you maximizing your time?

He runs different masterminds and investor groups that are really designed to help people become better investors. And he's a very, very successful investor himself and has been able to design kind of his ideal lifestyle because of the way he's invested. And so he really opens up, you know, the curtain on his own personal portfolio, which he has never done before. He said that on the interview, this was the first time he'd really done that. And to have someone of his caliber be able to share detailed information of what he's doing and how he's performing. Very, very insightful. So definitely encourage you to listen to that episode if you haven't. And then some of my favorite episodes, right? These aren't necessarily the most downloaded, but maybe some of the most impactful for me for a variety of reasons. And one of them was the, one of the more recent ones we've had, end of 2023, was Investing Like the Ultra Wealthy featuring our Tiger 21 founder, Michael Sonnenfeldt. This got great downloads, a lot of great feedback. but I definitely encourage you, if you haven't listened to this one, go listen to that episode. It is so impactful to hear from Michael at his level where, you know, he's been a very successful entrepreneur and has sold actually, you know, several businesses, very, very wealthy, and started a group called Tiger 21, which you might have heard of because we reference it all the time on our podcast because of the information that they publish from their investor group. So they have, I think it's several thousand investors in their network that pay money to become part of this group and they kind of consolidate their portfolio in kind of an aggregate way to see, you know, what are the different allocations that their investors are making. These are ultra-high-net-worth investors. And so it provides some really great insights. So I've referred to a lot, but not only is the data really, really good and just an amazing group to see what they're doing, but he provides so many amazing insights for entrepreneurs building businesses. And one of the things that has stuck with me ever since that episode was some of the unique perspectives he has on why entrepreneurs make terrible investors many times.

The nature of what it takes to be what it takes to be a great entrepreneur and what it takes to be a competent investor turn out to be incredibly different. Many people would say, aren't they just kind of the same? But it turns out that the skills and very nature of people who are entrepreneurs tend to be idea people. They tend to have creative ideas. They tend to get emotionally attached to the best of their ideas because if they're really good entrepreneurs, they know every single thing that's knowable about this little business that they've created. So they're in a unique position to assess risk.

And it's, it's a little bit weird to think about, but the skill sets that it takes to be a successful entrepreneur generally are willing to take excessive amounts of risk. But a lot of times those risks are calculated in ways that they have competitive advantages that are unique in their marketplace. And then also an extreme level of concentration and focus in one area that allows them to become an expert and to produce substantial amounts of wealth by doing so. And both of those concepts, right, taking massive risks and being highly concentrated, generally aren't good principles to employ as an investor that now has a different goal, right? If you've built wealth, if you've generated a nice nest egg and nice net worth and you're trying to invest it well, you don't want to take excessive amount of risk and you don't want to have high concentrations, right? You want to have diversification. And so he talks about the kind of struggles between a lot of investors that have have since sold businesses or kind of had a liquidity event and struggle initially to kind of find their footing there. So definitely really, really good information aside from a lot of other comments and things that he has that I really appreciated. And then another kind of, you know, that Michael Sonnenfeldt was a huge guest for me personally just because of how much I look up to what they're doing at Tiger 21 and him personally and his story. I just really love that. And then Jay Parsons was another person that was like a really big guest for us to have on the podcast. Really, really was excited to have him on. And he is the chief economist at RealPage, which is one of the biggest data providers and analytics firms for housing real estate. He is a huge presence on LinkedIn, which is where I kind of eventually found him. I've been following him for a long time, posting amazing insights. I was like, I got to get this guy on the podcast. Took a long time to get him, but we got him on and I came ready to go on this episode. I had so many questions. I think I had like 3 or 4 pages worth of questions and just went through them. And so that one was released in September of 2023. He actually made a lot of predictions that will kind of bear out into early 2024. I'm excited to kind of bring him back on this year to talk about those and see how those panned out. Right. And so if you kind of like the economic stuff, the market stuff, I definitely encourage you to check that one out. So that's— I could go into more. There's so many more. We had so many episodes, but those are some of my top ones. Definitely encourage you to go listen to some of those if you haven't yet. And really, what can we you know, expect going into 2024. This is again something that we're really focused on. We're really committed to continuing to grow this podcast, to really level up ourselves and make this a really world-class podcast. And there's a lot of things we have on the horizon. I can't share all of them yet because we're still kind of being played out. But, you know, out of this podcast, we've kind of launched a separate brand called Legacy Wealth Summit that if you weren't a part of our last summit in the last quarter, you can get the recordings on that one. It's pretty incredible. It was a live virtual event. We're going to be hosting another one in February, another live virtual event, Legacy Wealth Summit. Definitely register for that. These are kind of more focused kind of workshop-type environments to just level up education. So we partner with our good friends over at Sunrise Capital and it's a really cool event and that's kind of sponsored by our podcast and by Aspen Funds. So our goal is just to continue to do more education. If you also notice too, in August of last year, we started doing the Top of Mind episodes once a week. So those were kind of more intermittent, kind of things came up, but we said, hey, these are really valuable for our listeners and a little more kind of real-time information of what's going on. And so we started doing those once a week. So we've been releasing 2 episodes a week for most of the second half of the year and plan to do that all going forward into 2024. And we have other segments that we're excited to launch over time as, as we continue to put out more content. And, you know, we have other podcasts that we're thinking about launching that are kind of under this network. So there's a lot of things that we're working on and just We want to continue to provide more value for you all. So definitely appreciate you all helping us out, subscribing, rating this podcast. And to that point, if you guys are an avid listener, we definitely encourage you, if you can, just write us that review on Spotify, on Apple. That really helps us a lot. Just if we can get more reviews, it helps us get bigger guests on. Giving us feedback is really helpful so we can continue to improve it and make it, make it a better experience for you all. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel if you haven't yet. We're looking to do a lot more on YouTube and even additional content content outside of just the podcast on YouTube to really just continue to bring more value. And as always, you know, we have this section on our podcast page website, thebillionairepodcast.com, where you can ask us anything, right? This is a way that you can just reach out. I see all those emails that kind of get sent to us. So reach out here, suggest content, suggest articles, suggest things that you're seeing that you want to hear more about, right? That's something that's really helpful for us. And one of the things that we've kind of shifted our approach going into this year because of that feedback back is to do more what I'll call, say, evergreen or educational content, kind of 101-type content. We did one, you know, recently, a few months ago on capital calls, right? What is it a capital call? My investment has one. Should I do it? We got a lot of feedback on that. It was really helpful for people just to understand, right? So sometimes we talk about these esoteric concepts and get more into the weeds of, you know, economic content. But it's really helpful to take a step back and just go, let's explain all these concepts. Let's break it down. And we're going to do more of that. We've, we've, we hear that you guys want more of that. We're going to do more of that. And we're also planning on putting out some more webinar content. So you probably got into, if you're on our email list, you probably saw we did a lot of webinars last year on different topics, a lot of times economic content. We're going to be doing several webinars over the next few months and just additional ways to go dive deeper into one topic. So encourage you to sign up for those and we'll be referencing those in the podcast as well. With that, I want to be done talking on my little monologue here, but just again, so grateful for you all that are listeners here and, you know, Again, give us that feedback. It really helps us. We're excited for 2024. We really believe that there's going to be some amazing opportunities as investors to come into the opportunity set before us in this year and really believe now is the time to get educated. Now is the time to get ready to position yourself for a really incredible 2024. So with that, thank you all. Let's go on this journey together and a lot more exciting things coming to you in 2024 and Hope to, to see you there.