179: Wealth Creation Tips and Strategies with Casey Stubbs

Welcome to the Heroic Investing Show. As first responders, we risk our lives every day. Our financial security is under attack. Our pensions are in a state of emergency. A single on duty incident can alter or erase our earning potential instantly and forever. We are the heroes of society. We are self reliant and we need to take care of our own financial future. The Heroic Investing show is our toolkit of business and investing tactics on our mission to financial freedom.

This is Heroic Investing Episode 179. Today, yours truly is again in the hot seat. I'm interviewed on this episode by Casey Stubbs. You might remember Casey from back on episode 148 where I interviewed him for Heroic Investing. Casey is an army veteran turned entrepreneur, business owner and coach. Probably he's most well known for training individuals on how to become successful traders of stocks and the markets. He also very much loves his role as a speaker, as a coach, and as a podcast host. And so I really enjoyed being interviewed on the Cash Flow Hacking podcast by Casey and the time that he gave me and our audience in agreeing to let us air this episode on Heroic Investing. So I think many of you enjoyed Casey back on episode 148. I got some great feedback on that one and I look forward to feedback again on this episode. Let me know what you think and let's keep the episodes rolling. Thanks so much everyone for the awesome feedback that you provide me every week.

Welcome to the Cash Flow Hacking podcast where we help people increase their cash flow. We do this by talking to the experts who have a proven financial strategy that has worked for them. We get the inside info with the smartest people by taking a deep dive, asking the right questions and getting specific action steps that you can use. We study the experts who have defied conventional wisdom, who have unlocked the doors to greater wealth, and we share it with you. For those of you who realize that you're not yet at your full potential, you're underemployed, or you're simply looking to grow your cash flow. This is the podcast for you. Welcome to the Cash Flow Hacking Podcast hosted by Casey Stubbs. This is Casey Stubbs from the Cash Flow Hacking Podcast and today we're with Gary Pinkerton. He runs a podcast called Heroic Investing Podcast and you can find him at garypinkerton.com thanks for being on the show, Gary.

Hey, thanks so much, Casey. It's a true pleasure, man. True pleasure.

Awesome. And so, Gary, in this show we like to talk about making money, additional streams of revenue, whatever it may be, whether it's investing Whether it's real estate, whether it's starting a business, and I know you're involved in many of those things, so why don't you start out by just telling us a little bit about yourself?

Sure. So it's not. Not go too far back. It might scare the audience to say that I'm going to go back 30 years, but I won't stay there long. I grew up in the Midwest on a dairy farm. And, you know, it was. It was some tough Times in the 1980s with high interest rates. And so I learned some. Some stuff about personal finance that really stuck with me throughout life. And one of the things, though, is that I got focused on getting out of the Midwest, and I didn't have money for college, so I went to the Naval Academy, and I just kept pushing for the jobs or the careers that had kind of the highest opportunity for income, for bonuses, for career progression and promotion. And that led me to something that was super challenging, which was nuclear submarine force. And I spent 25 years doing that after graduating from the academy. And so about 30 years total in uniform. In around 2011, I was leaving command of my submarine, the USS Tucson, and I was, you know, the family, frankly, was pretty burned out. It was a great command tour. I know I was very upwardly mobile, leaving that job, you know, things. It was a very bright future. But the family was really. Was tired, was worn out. My wife was really kind of desiring to get her career up and running again. She'd taken the decade off to help grow the young kids. And so we were looking for alternatives. And simultaneously, that was 2008, 9, 10 period, where we lost a lot of our family wealth. And that really frustrated me that my money was exposed in a place where I was paying no attention to it and frankly, had no personal expertise. Started to get excited about cash flow and real estate. And to be very simple about it, I was taking money, repositioning money where I wasn't in direct control and paying any attention, moving it into real estate. My big picture thought was retire from the military, let my wife get her career up and running and just manage my real estate. And kind of along the way, you know, as I was getting ready to purchase that first property, I learned about a way that I could more efficiently store and access the money that I was going to be putting in as the down payments. I call it infinite banking. I call it. You know, there's a lot of names, but it's. It's using a more traditional way to grow personal wealth. And so I Started a business, left the military and started business doing that. I really thought initially I was going to be just managing my rental properties. And we have built up over those six or seven years, 20 properties, about 30 doors. So, you know, a lot of my wife's time and my time is spent managing the managers with that, you know, kind of focusing on improving cash flow there. And it's. It's been a really good story. It's not perfect with tenants and toilets. You know, you always have some drama. But I've become much more inspired about kind of my own personal business and the stuff that, you know, you can. There's a lot of resources on the website and things like that. But I love my real estate. I'm continuing to grow there as much as I can and just kind of focusing on personal business.

All right, well, that's a pretty good history. So I remember we talked before and for some reason I didn't pick up that you were on a submarine. When you mentioned it this time, it kind of caught my interest. So what did you do on the submarine?

So I was an officer. And you start off kind of. There's really four levels and most Navy ships actually in submarines, it's very well defined that because you're away from your family and you're at sea for long periods of time, deployments are just a thing, a normal thing in the Navy with this long time history of essentially two to three years on a ship, and then you transfer from that command and you go to some kind of shore duty, which is focused on getting you back, reconnected with the family, maybe giving you a chance to work on, you know, education or something. And then you rotate back onto ships. And so you start off as a division officer, you know, kind of the junior officer level, young guy in your early 20s, learning the ship, learning how to be a leader. And then you come back as a department head and you have three or four of those division officers working for you. Then you come back the third time as an executive officer. And then as you're approaching 20 years, you're coming back for your fourth ship as a commanding officer. And then you're basically done with a ship. So you're about 20, 25 years. You probably won't be on any more ships. You may be commanding a squadron of submarines and then moving on to, like, the higher ranks of the government. But. So, you know, I was leaving my last ship command of the USS Tucson out in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. We had had an incredible deployment. It was two and a half years that Just flew by. I loved kind of having my own little company, if you will. My own, My own crew, my own group of people being able to, you know, call the shots. I felt like we made a tremendous difference in the world with our deployment, and it was just a great experience. But I also knew leading there, I was not within the Navy, going to have too many more opportunities to have my own kind of company, if you will. And it sparked within me this drive for entrepreneurship that I just really couldn't kick back. I mean, it was there when I was a kid on the farm. My father had been really ill when I was young, and I was as a teenager keeping the farm afloat, running the whole thing, really, with my sister. And it was challenging, but it was also incredibly inspiring. And I'd forgotten a lot of that, being kind of more in a structured government W2 salary kind of position. It got rekindled when I was in command and I knew that I just wasn't going to go back. So, you know, I'm inspired by leading other people, by running companies, being entrepreneur. And I. And on my podcast, Heroic Investing, as you remember, I try to inspire others not to bail from the military and bail from their desire to be a service provider, but to look at maybe doing both or what do they do when they. When they leave. And I know that's very much your story as well.

Yeah. So when you were on the sub, then you were that. Would you be considered the captain or. They don't do that for submarines.

Yeah, yeah, the last one. Finally. You know, when I got that last round. Yeah.

And you didn't. You didn't continue with the Navy because you really enjoyed the leadership aspect and you didn't really feel like you'd have that opportunity again because it's more of a high level type leadership.

Right, right. So there's a little bit of oversight that you really don't get away from. I mean, even on my ship, I wasn't like autonomous, but when we were at sea, I was. And it was. I'm not trying to make this come across as I'm a power hungry individual. It's absolutely not. I worked very much on being a humble individual, and I think I'm pretty decent at that. You'd have to ask my friends. But what I'm trying to say is that the ability to wake up and go in and say, you know what? You know, you have a crew and something that's flexible, where the crew member says, let's try this a little differently, and you have the flexibility to do that, you have the ability to bring your kind of work council together or your department heads together and say, listen, here's a challenge we're facing. What do you guys think we should do? You know, and working it out and coming up with a plan and then being able to implement that plan, that doesn't happen when you're a cog in a wheel. Right. And when you leave independent command at sea, they call it for the Navy, which is something that's been around for 150 years on submarines. You still have that. Like if you know your boss, you know, when you guys were on land, he always had the ability and the expectation that he was going to call back and kind of check with the bosses above him and the ones at the Pentagon telling them what to do. When you're in the Navy and you're out of communications on a submarine, because if you communicate, you get found there, you're expected to, you know, you have the responsibility and the accountability, but you also have the, you are empowered to make decisions and kind of run your own little company.

Right?

So I loved it and the crew responded and I could tell that, you know, it was a good fit. So I, right now I'm not running a large company, but I think that's in the future.

Very cool. So when you said your deployment that was like two and a half years, you were actually gone for two and a half years?

No, I was in command of the submarine for two and a half years. So the deployment was just over six months.

Okay, yeah, that's pretty cool. This is definitely the cash flow hacking podcast, but I don't talk to a lot of commanders of submarines very often, so I wanted to really dive in. As a matter of fact, that's like a first opportunity ever. So I wanted to get, get some info on that because it's pretty cool. And I had a family member that was on a submarine too, in the Navy. So my grandfather was a submarine guy during World War II. And so when I hear that, I'm really interested in it.

Yeah, yeah. Amazing people. When I was leaving the Naval Academy, I was really torn and these were opposite ends of the opportunities that I had. Like, I didn't have a vision to be a pilot. I was a private pilot at the time, but I didn't have the vision to do Navy pilot. I was very drawn to small unit camaraderie, people who are just really driven to be, you know, to excellence. And I found that in the Marine Corps, you know, on ground, kind of lower tech community of weapons and stuff, and then the submarine force, and mainly because both of them were small unit, felt, you know, somewhat elite, not with an attitude, but just like they were pushing towards excellence and doing something that everyone else just thought was crazy to try to do. You know, doing things that the Marine Corps does, you know, fighting wars from the ocean, running up the land or submarine force, you know, going underwater. But there's a lot of similarities. And so I was really torn between those two. And it's the small unit camaraderie, everyone working to a common goal. That's the stuff that really got me inspired.

Yeah, that is pretty cool. And I know that with running my business, it is really nice to have a team and to get together and do problem solving and finding out what, what kind of things we want to tackle and moving forward our objectives and you know, doing monthly goals and really working together to do really good things. So I enjoy that part of it as well. That's really good. So as far as earning some extra revenue, what, what type of techniques have you undergone? I know that when you're running a business, it's. It can be really nice to have some passive revenue or something on the side while you're trying to build your business. Because as crazy as it sounds, you might be building a business and might be making a lot of money in the business, but you personally might not get a lot of money. So it's good to have some other type of revenue flow while that's going on.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I started off again, if you remember the beginning there, I started off thinking that what I was going to do is take money that I had in stocks, bonds and mutual funds and I was going to move that into a cash flowing asset, have that cash flowing asset, replace the, you know, the part of my W2 salary that was coming in that wouldn't be there with the retirement. So I was very blessed to have a percentage of my normal income when I retired, still be there, and I was going to replace the rest of it with cash flow from the property. Sounds pretty simple. And it would have been. I think it would have worked out just fine. Along the way I got inspired and I didn't want to just kind of sit around and manage my rental properties. But what I've kind of learned over that time is that real estate, you know, multidimensional asset, has so many benefits that I really, that I really appreciate. So, you know, it has the ability to offset inflation, it brings some cash flow, not necessarily huge cash flow. Sometimes it depends on you know, just the numbers of the property and it, you know, you have a tenant in there that's paying down your mortgage, so it's building equity for you. And you have some fantastic tax benefits that got better in 2018. So what I thought was going to be, you know, my income to live on. I got inspired about running this insurance based financial planning business and that has just been tremendous for me. So this cash flow coming from the rental properties, I'm just plowing back into rental properties. I don't really pull a lot of cash flow from it, but a lot of my clients do. And the fact that you can shield that income that you have coming in with depreciation and make it essentially tax free. I haven't paid a penny on any of the income that I've gotten from my real estate since 2011 when I started. And I know when you're near the situation where I'm going to start paying taxes on that income, I just have a lot of, you know, paper losses that are helping offset that. And again, it got better in 2018. So it's a tremendous asset class for helping you grow wealth tax efficiently. You know, I use that, I use it combination with this cash flow banking idea or infinite banking idea to protect and grow my family's wealth and do it in a tax efficient manner. Typically it's tax free, so that's really why I focus on those assets. But essentially what I do is I look at getting as much prudent Fannie Mae fixed rate government debt, or at least 30 year fixed rate commercial debt or something on a property that after the principal interest tax and insurance is still going to positively cash flow or at least break even. Because essentially what I'm looking to do is take advantage of leveraged prudent debt to help me more than offset inflation. Let's say that inflation out there is 3%. And so that means that your property long term is going to go up 3%. Well, if you can get a bank to fund 80% of that money, that's a 5 to 1 ratio. So instead of your 3% inflation, you're essentially getting 15% appreciation. So just, you know, you're kind of leveraging leverage, offsetting inflation, that's one big thing. And then your tenants paying down the mortgage. So that's, you know, on an average or like 10% a year that you're getting. So cash flow is important, but to me, cash flow is staying power. The real way to create wealth is have that cash flow staying power help you offset all the expenses and overcome speed bumps of having vacancies and repairs and stuff, and then let that underlying aspect of mortgage pay down appreciation all kind of help you grow permanent long term wealth in a big way.

So then the equity of growing equity into those properties, you're using that, that money for the rentals to build your equity up. And that is cash flow. It's a smaller number of cash flow. It's not like getting you wealthy, but it's building that equity that's really working in your favor.

Right. So in your working years I feel that it's, you know, one of. Well, let me just back up and say that I teach my clients that you should just look at your financial world and your entire life, but let's just stick with finance. In your financial world, where are your strengths? For example, somebody who is extremely healthy and treats themselves well and you know, and would get a very highly rated life insurance policy, well, that person is going to get a really good return on the investment of their dollars in there or the savings of their dollars. That's an asset for them, the fact that they're healthy and compared to everyone else, it will pay out financially. If you have a good income where a bank is going to want to give you some 30 year fixed rate debt, which is just phenomenal stuff to have, right? That's an asset, you should leverage that asset. And so those aspects are really what or is going to cause somebody to be able to magnify their wealth. The cash flow. When you're in your working years, your production years, you should take advantage of these assets that won't be around. You know, let's say you shift into, into kind of decumulation mode where you're just living on what you have accumulated up as assets. Bank's not going to want to give you those loans at that point because you don't have that other asset which was your ability to produce and create income from a W2 or from your own salary. So different points throughout life. But when you're in our point, which is the working stage as you build a business, you have cash flow coming in or you just have a really nice W2 income, you should use that asset to be able to leverage with a loan. And so the cash flow is really just servicing that at that period. You can very easily transition that into a paid off property. If you wanted to be able to get a much higher cash flow. When you're transitioning from earning income to living on the assets you have. Right.

And so it's a good long term foundation to help you for retirement, for when you're not working. And appreciation of the properties also helps as well. Have you been experiencing appreciation in the properties that you've been able to acquire?

Yeah, in some of my markets, I've gotten, you know, I've actually kind of strategically tried to purchase in markets that would possibly achieve that. So I did a majority of my initial investment in the Midwest, from Texas to St. Louis or to Missouri, and a lot there in the breadbasket area. And that stuff's really just appreciating at the inflation rate. Sometimes you'll hear people say the inflation rate is 3%. It's been that for a few years. And then they'll say, well, real estate has gone up at 5 or 6%. That's higher than inflation. Okay. But I step back and say, maybe in a short period of time. But the reason that real estate's 5 or 6% over the last hundred years, because in the 80s and 90s, it was around 18%. I know, I lived it on my farm, so that's why it looks like it's bigger. But big picture, if we look back into the 1700s and we say real estate's weird, it grows at 2% more than inflation for 200 years. That's not possible. None of us would be able to live in houses. They would be so expensive. So big picture, I think if we step back and say it's just the same as the inflation rate. But, you know, you can. If you, if you're an individual and the baby boomers are going through this, they're in a kind of a cash position, then they're exposed to their dollars deflating at 3% a year or 4% a year, whatever it is. If you just simply take that money, put it in a hard asset, it could be gold, it could be dry land or, you know, open land, it could be a rental property, something that doesn't depreciate in value, then you've just kind of stopped the losses of your dollars, your mountain of dollars getting smaller and smaller and smaller, like the loss of your buying power because of inflation. So you've stopped that part. But then if you say, hey, Mr. Banker, I'd really like you to put like 80% of the money into this. And I would still like to get the impact of Austin. And so that's what I was saying is that if you can get a 5 to 1, like an 80% loan, then if your property is just appreciating at 3%, which means that you're kind of treading water and not losing to inflation. But now you got a 5 to 1 ratio on that. It's a magnified ability to grow wealth there. So for me, again, the fact that the tenants paying off my mortgage, that I'm offsetting inflation at like a 5 to 1 ratio, is much more important than the pure cash flow. Again, I'm not in a position where I want to live on that cash flow. And a lot of my clients are not in that position either. They like their job, but what they really want, Casey, is they want the ability to quit their job if they need to. That's. That was the fascinating thing that I realized, is that once I got the ability, I had that cash flow if I wanted it and I could just walk away from earned income. I actually didn't mind going to work anymore. And so many of my clients say the same thing. They say, you know what? I hated my job until that point where I had the ability to not have to go to work. And then I went and I told my wife did this. Actually, it's a great, great story from Sue. She. She hated going to work every day. And once she got to the point where she had her 10 properties and she had replaced her income if she wanted to do that, she walked in her boss and she's like, okay, listen, here's what I think. I'm going to quit. And he said, no, no, no, don't quit. We love you here. And she says, well, okay, I don't think you can honor what I want to do because the changes that have to make for me to keep coming here is I want to come into work at 7:30 in the morning because I hate the. I hate sitting in rush hour traffic for an hour and a half. And you know, I want to work four days a week most of the time, and I want to do this, I want to do that. And she would never have put those demands out there if she had been depending on that income, right? But they bought all the demands and she kept going there and she didn't hate it anymore. And I've heard that from so many of my clients that most people hate their job or dislike it or want to change. And once they get the ability to do it, most of them don't jump. They just have the ability to jump and they make some minor transitions and they continue to earn income. Now you got this cash flow coming from the real estate that you thought you're gonna have to live on. Now what do you do with it? Will you plow back into more or some other asset. Continue to grow your wealth. And so I think a lot of people that I work with, their cash flow doesn't end up being that thing that they're gonna live on. It's just helping them grow wealth in conservative buckets where it's not at risk. Yeah.

I think being in a position where you enjoy your job is really one of the most important things. And having a little bit of leverage to make some changes to make it a good environment is a good idea. I know right now I truly enjoy what I do. And there's been a few jobs where that wasn't the case. And I would always be, like, looking at my watch every 10 minutes. You know, it's like. Like I get it done at 3:30 and I'd be like, am I. Is it 3:30 yet? You know, and I. Literally, the day would take forever. And now I look at the clock and it's like, oh, man, it's time to go home. You know, it's just a totally different situation.

Yeah. And I, you know, with what I know about you, Casey, and what you're doing is out there, you know, running this podcast, it is inspiring. You can see it on your face. Right. And it's because you're helping other people. And it's interesting. People ask me all the time, okay, so you commanded a nuclear submarine. You were upwardly mobile in the Navy. You were doing well. How did you end up as an insurance salesman? Which is, you know, it's a basic level, what I do. And then my friend Aaron Chapman, who's a mortgage broker, technically, he is just helping change people's lives. And so you. You're doing it with a cash flow podcast. You're doing with teaching people how to trade equities. I'm teaching people how to store wealth. He's teaching people how to strategically use prudent debt to help them with real estate. All of us are really just helping inspire people to take back more control of their stuff, to help them grow to a higher level. It's really just a platform. Our positions, our jobs are just a platform for us to help people. And that's why you and Aaron and I are very inspired and enjoy what we're doing because it's given us the freedom to be able to help others change their lives. That's what I feel, at least.

Yeah, I agree. And I think there's a lot of traps out there. Like, when you're talking about inflation, I think that's like a silent destroyer. Most people don't even know that it exists and it literally eats people's money away.

Yeah. You know, people who are the baby boomers that are on fixed income and that have, maybe they have annuities that don't have inflation adjustment or they have, most of them just have like a 401k or some retirement assets. And the model there is that you can't spend the principal. Right. And in this low interest rate world, inflation, Maybe they're making 2 or 3% on their money, but inflation's eating all of that. So every year they're just staring in kind of a pitiful world of staring at this amount of money. And that pile gets a little bit smaller every year. And it's. Even if it stays the same, it's buying power.

Well, that's the thing, is it doesn't look smaller, but it really is because if you go out and go shopping, you're not going to get as much.

Yeah. Right. So I'm just trying to prevent the next generation to not be in that world. You know, there's ways we can help people who are already there, they're already in fixed income and retirement. And I love helping individuals like that just get a little bit more efficient and just think a little bit differently about their money for a better quality of life. But there's so much that we can do for people who aren't quite there yet. Right. You know, have them learn how to get some cash flowing assets, get some, you know, to get equities that will provide some, some reasonable, safe return on their investment. That's not just handing your money to somebody else and trying to grow a pile bigger. You know, get cash flow from that, get cash flow from some real estate, do a combination of both. It's so important on quality of life when you get to that point where you're not working with earned income anymore.

I agree. Yeah, that's really good. So tell us a little bit about the podcast that your host who would really benefit from checking it out. We'll post a link below that, below this episode so people can go ahead and check it out.

Awesome. So anybody who wants to see Casey Stubbs on the other side of the table and getting interviewed. So that's coming up here soon. I try to focus on first responders. I call it American Heroes. So heroic investing. So these individuals, whether they're police officers, firefighters, EMTs, active duty veterans, I'm sorry, active duty members of the military and veterans, or retired first responders, they're individuals that have spent their life doing crazy hours. They've asked their families time and time and time again to make sacrifices because they're going to be gone for days on end, they're going into harm's way. These people have given up a lot and I think that they always put others in front of them, otherwise they wouldn't be in these positions. So they're always like, you know what, just take one more for the team. This is important. This person's counting on me. And they don't put their own family sometimes and certainly themselves and their finances out front. This podcast was started by a good friend of mine, Jason Hartman, and he still co hosts it with me. Its intention in 2008, 9 and 10 was to try to help out and give some options for individuals, first responders mainly that had state pensions that were going away or local municipality pensions that were at risk of going away. And you know, what do they do for cash flow in their retirement? I've morphed it a little bit to talk about entrepreneurship, the benefits of real estate investing still, but more entrepreneurship and investing some money in yourself to grow that number one asset, cash flowing asset you have, which is yourself, right. And your ability to add value to the world. So we talk a little bit about anyone who's interested, I guess in cash flow or earning cash flows, specifically through real estate or starting your own business, resources out there for military, individuals, you know, on how to get a business started. And really just if you feel like, you know, I'd really like to start my own business or I'd like to have a side job or I'd like to get going on in real estate, but I don't feel like I can do it. Getting into a community of people that are doing it. And so you just keep hearing week after week these people that are doing it and being successful and they're giving their contact information so you can reach out to them. I think that's really it is convincing yourself that it's reasonable with any busy work life because there's other people out there doing it.

Excellent. Okay, well Gary, thanks a lot for being on the show and sharing with us today. It's been a pleasure.

It has. Casey, number two for the two of us and I get a good vibe every time I talk to you. Thanks so much to personally, you know, watch a lot of stuff you have going on. Casey, watch you develop and man, love to connect with your audience. Thanks so much, man.

Excellent. Thank you.

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