219: Money Matters with Adam Torres

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.

Welcome to the Heroic Investing Show, a podcast for first responders, members of the military, veterans and anyone looking to improve their financial future and gain some freedom with their time. We teach America's heroes how how to build passive income, build their startup business and safely grow wealth through real estate and other alternative investments. We help current and prior first responders put protections, systems and a team in place to help them build a life where they can focus on their passion, that service or product that they are uniquely gifted to share with others, making the world a better place for all of us. My name is Gary Pinkerton and I co host this show with Jason Hartman. This is episode 219. Episode 219. Today we're turning the tables. You'll hear me interviewed by Adam Torres on his podcast called Money Matters Top Tips. And on his podcast he essentially interviews people for 10 to 15 minutes about their business, about why they do what they do what they do and how this might help out clients out there. And he also takes quite a few of the individuals and puts them into a book where he just basically compiles all of the stories together, which I think would be a pretty compelling story. I do something similar with a great friend of mine, Kyle Wilson. I'm about to be hosted in or a co author in a second one that'll come out here in early 2020. And it's about individuals, entrepreneurs, business owners, people with expertise in an area, sharing their story, how they got there, what made them successful and what to focus on. And I think there are some great lessons to be learned from people like that. I'm a huge fan of reading biographies or autobiographies by America's, not just America's, but the world's greatest leaders. Obviously they became great because they were really good at doing something and they may know something that I don't know, which is why perhaps I'm not at their level yet. So I love learning from America's greats and that is what I've done in participating in these two books. I've became close friends with my co authors, learned a tremendous amount from them they just have extremely inspiring stories. So I think the same thing could be said for what Adam is doing with his Top Tip books from Money Matters. So, you know, one of the things that we talk about on here is a company that I'm rebranding as that I haven't really talked anything about yet. And it's called Aligned Strategic Wealth. It has really a couple of purposes, but primarily what I feel like is that the value that I can best add to my clients is to help surround them with ethical individuals that are at the top of their game that will help them succeed in what they want to do in life. You know, for example, I have a lot of rental properties, real estate, so does Jason Hartman. Right. And we're co hosting this podcast and we both believe in that as a long term way to build wealth in America, but really anywhere it has been throughout history. However, I'm not personally excited about real estate itself. I feel like it is a great place to store and grow wealth. It's not what I want my day job to be and I think that's okay. I think a lot of my clients are the same way. We all have this inspiring little thing we do in our garage. We tinker with some project or maybe it's in the. It's just kind of figuratively in the garage, but it's really in the back of our mind. And maybe we call it a hobby. Maybe we just do something on the weekends or over the holidays when we get together with friends that they just are amazed that we do and they always ask us to do it. But we don't really consider it to be that unique gift that our unique genius that we could share with the world if we set up our lives in a way in which we could do that non stop. And that's really what inspires me about helping others set up their financial lives so that they can turn and focus on what they really, really want to do every day for the rest of their life. And I think the world would be a tremendously better place if we did that. I also think it is the path to preserving this amazing experiment that our founding fathers started over 250 years ago. And I think that if we can get people focused back on the diligence of working their craft, of perfecting their craft and sharing it with the world, knowing just a little bit about financial matters and marketing and how to identify what their genius is, then we set up this world that is back to more what I remember when I was a kid, which is everybody really just working on their business. It was not to go work for a big company, get a good job that's safe and secure and hold onto that and have somebody else manage your family's finances. Listen, it doesn't work for us to hand off our health, managing our health to somebody else or our marriage, you know, our marital relationships or family relationships. It doesn't work for us to give somebody else the job of educating us or our children, by the way. And so it doesn't make sense that we can just hand off our financial lives to somebody else as well. So it is my goal with this Aligned Strategic wealth is to provide you individuals that you can surround yourself with that are your advisors. They're not going to take things over for you like you know, just put your Money in your 401k and you're in it for the good times and bad and it'll be there when you get to the end. Like I don't know that many people that have gotten wealthy in their 401k. Yeah, maybe they've saved a million dollars and so now there's a million dollars in there, but they have not gotten wealthy that way. And it's because they've completely abdicated the responsibility to manage that part of their lives. So I surround myself with some amazing, amazing advisors. I have a cpa, Jesse, that is just tremendous. I have a mortgage broker and.

Mortgage initiator I guess is his real title. But you've heard me talk about Aaron. Aaron has been on my show many times. He's a fantastic individual. He's at the top of his game and he has taught me a lot about life and friendship and focusing on other individuals, on my clients and on abundance. I have a great friend who runs a family industrial business up in Michigan and he has taught me a tremendous amount about due diligence with respect to real estate and about the character of the individuals that you're working with and what's important about how they run that investment that my clients may be interested in participating in. Now I've made mistakes in all kinds of investments, but once I started to surround myself with these individuals that are like minded that I've known to be ethical and that will actually help me as opposed to just getting a transactional commission and moving on, that started to make the snowball start to roll in my life and the financial snowball if you will. And it has made a tremendous difference. So now I want to be that person and I've rebrand my company Prosperity Life Solutions as Aligned Strategic wealth. And so you Know you have to be strategic about your wealth and I want you to be. I want your advisors all to be in alignment. Listen, if I meet with a client and their CPA is not on board with what we do, I know it's going to not be a long term relationship unless one of us goes away or one of us changes our opinion. Because you cannot have advisors that are focused and giving you advice in opposite directions. Okay, enough of an intro to that one. I really do truly hope that you enjoy this interview of me by Adam Torres on Money Matters. Thank you.

Hey. I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Money Matters Top Tips for Success where each and every day I bring on new business owners, entrepreneurs and executives and have them share their top tips for success with you. My name is Adam Torres. You can follow me on Instagram @AskAdam. Torres, keep up with my book releases, book tour schedule, signings, all that other good stuff. Always love to connect with you there. And as always, if you'd like to apply to become a co author of one of my upcoming books, just head on over to the website moneymatterstop tips.com and click on Come in. Offer to apply. Alright, so today I have Gary Pinkerton on the line and he's the president over at Aligned Strategic Wealth. Gary, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Adam.

It's a true pleasure. I look forward to it. So I'm excited to get more into what you're doing over at Aligned Strategic wealth. But before we do that, let's get a little bit more into your background. So how did you get started in business and in your career?

Well, it was a little bit of a roundabout way. I grew up on a dairy farm in Illinois. And in the 1980s when it was very challenging to own a farm anywhere with high interest rates and essentially we were getting out of the business and we're very, very poor. And so I went to one of.

The two places that decided to bring.

Me on to college for free and that was the awesome US Naval Academy. I had a great time, but I was very, very focused on consistent, solid income. And So I spent 25 years in a great field with some great, really tremendous individuals and as a nuclear, nuclear submarine officer. And as I was finishing that, I was beaten up pretty rough in the 2008 and nine correction off a lot of our personal wealth and a lot of the work that I'd done the previous 20 years. And it caused me to make a change. And I got into real estate and then I also got into just being A personal financial assets advisor for other individuals to help them find the path that I took about eight years ago.

Now, man, I love your story. Obviously not because of the downs that you had to go through, right? But we all go through these ups and downs and sideways and your story just proves something really important, that it doesn't matter how solid your income is, it doesn't matter, you know, what your position is, that you really need that solid financial background or to work with a solid financial advisor to really protect those assets that you've earned. What I find is so many people, and we're going to get into this as little bit more when you, when we get further into aligned strategic wealth. But so many people just need that help. But before we get into that, so there's some younger entrepreneurs listening. There's some, also some, you know, fresh college grads that are thinking about their next step in terms of careers. And I personally have a bias. I mean I was an advisor for many years prior to going into media. But you know, they may be considering a career in finance. What kind of advice would you give to that new college grad that's thinking about going that financial advisor route?

You know, it's really very similar to any business. You know, As I mentioned, 25 years in nuclear submarines and being successful there was about being a technical expert and being somebody who could relate to other individuals and somebody who went above and beyond what everybody else did. You know, if you dust yourself up, we all get knocked down, right? So you dust yourself up one more time than the competition does and you treat your clients a little bit better than everybody else did and better than they expected. You will generate raving fans around you and the product really doesn't matter if you believe in it and it's an ethical pursuit, you're going to succeed. And so, you know, personally, I think, you know, if I were to give them just a little bit of an out of the box recommendation, go look at what has created true wealth for centuries on this globe. And it's not, it's not kind of the flash in the pan 1970s to current time, which is really about investing in stocks and things that you know nothing about, about day trading and things like that. That's not what has created true long term wealth. So that's a little bit about what my company is and the direction we go. But just take a, take a moment to kind of study the long term perspective and then make sure that if you're setting yourself up for a 50, 60 year long career that you're doing it in something that you feel like is not a short term.

That's awesome. So I think it's also a great transition. Let's get a little bit more into what you're doing over at Align Strategic wealth or actually first, I believe you have a podcast out also, correct?

I do, yeah. So I started my financial services second career for my life after first taking a few years and repositioning our financial assets from primarily the markets where other people were handling it to real estate. And so my wife and I just transitioned everything into cash flowing rental properties. We now have 20 buildings, 30, 30 properties across four different states. And in doing that, I became good friends with a few real estate providers and one of them is a gentleman that I do a podcast with. My podcast is called Heroic Investing and you can find it@ heroicinvesting.com or on, you know, wherever you get your podcast. I try to give back to other members of the military and first responders and to just help people gain some confidence into going out there and becoming entrepreneurs and maybe learn a little bit about their own finances. But it's really more about real estate and about starting your own business than it is about what I do as a day job.

You are holding out on me, Gary, Come on. Of course I want to promote your podcast. I love the podcasting community and getting my listeners new podcasts to listen to. Don't hold out on me. Come on.

So, okay, now let's transition into what you're doing over at Allied Strategic Wealth. So Align Strategic. Well, excuse me. So tell me a little bit more about the business. Right. Yeah.

So I partner with a very, very close friend of mine and my, my advisor in 2011 when I started this path. His name is Patrick Donahoe and he runs a company called Paradigm Life and they're out of Utah. They have probably the state of the art education.

Self, you know, self education or self teaching website out there. We meet with clients across the country dependent, but I partner with him to, to work with clients to help them understand what we do and essentially what we do. If you've heard of the concept of infinite banking or high cash value life insurance, it's insurance based financial planning and I personally work almost exclusively with business owners and real estate investors. People who have an amount of money that they're about to go stick into something for a long period of time. Maybe it's a capital investment in their business or perhaps it's a rental property they're going to hold on to for several years. Well, there's a there's a really good advantage to not drop your dollars into this kind of house, jail thing, I call it, if it's a rental property and have it stuck there. Rather you have the ability to borrow, even the down payment, specifically in this case from a bank or an insurance company and kind of supplement that large, you know, conventional loan that you get on it. Or if you're going to, you know, invest in your business, you can avoid putting your own dollars in there, let your own dollars sit back and grow in a tax free environment. And the long term compound in that is pretty substantial. So that's, that was really the primary things that I wanted to do this with my own rental property. Starting almost a decade ago now. And about three or four years into that, I realized that this is inspiring me far more than what I was doing as a senior officer in the Navy at the time. I was at the Pentagon and then over at the Naval Academy. Very rewarding. But I was not having the ability to touch as many people and specifically inspire entrepreneurship, which is what really, really drives me. You know, I feel that our founding fathers, 250 years ago started an experiment that's been a success. But every year that we go along, there's more and more things that kind of dig at that success. And I think we need to inspire entrepreneurship and have people help set up their financial lives to pull that off. So that's what gets me going, my friend.

That's awesome. I love that story. And now I know it's good. Like it's gonna vary. That type of strategy is gonna vary from person to person. And everybody listening, this is not investment advice for you, but just to give some generalities, what kind of investors are typically a good fit for, for inquiring about the type of strategy you mentioned and implement?

You know, it's, it's anyone who.

You're right, there's a large, there is a large variety. I have lots of clients that are starting off, you know, I have a new couple that I just met with. They're starting off and putting a couple thousand dollars a year into the policy. I work very often with, as I mentioned, business owners and real estate investors. And these are, these are also people who maybe just refinance their primary residence and want to store the money somewhere on its way to being in other investments. So often I will have people who have a lump sum of dollars that they would like to reposition and put in. But the most important thing is that you have that it is for someone who values long term solid Ways to grow wealth. Not a get rich quick scheme, but rather get rich intentionally and over a long period of time. So this life insurance policies are the way in which we store most of our capital when we're funding our personal lives. This way is going to perform better than a savings account, maybe 4% tax free or so it's not going to perform as compared to the, you know, the stock market. Its intention is to be the new liquid asset that's much more efficient, not the investment, it enables an investment. So it's really for anyone who has a long term perspective, who has cash flow left over at the end of the month of any scale, it can really be scaled up and down.

Oh, that's awesome. That's great stuff. So Gary, if somebody's listening to this and they want more information or to reach out to you, what's the best way for them to get that?

Yeah, that's an awesome question. I appreciate that. So I have a profile@paradigmlife.net but to get directly to me in kind of, you know, a more short circuited way, you can just go to my personal website, GaryPinkerton.com so you can either email me@garyarypinkerton.com or just go to GaryPinkerton.com and they can contact there. You can find the books that I've participated in and a little bit more about this. But it'll also help you on that rabbit trail to find out more about my primary, you know, job, which is, which is helping people with insurance based, more traditional type financing.

That's awesome. Well, hey Gary, really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing more about your background and all the great work you're doing and to the audience, as always, thank you for tuning in. I hope you got a lot of value out of this. If you did, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. Leave me a review on the Apple itunes store. Means a lot to me. And don't forget to share this with your friends. I hope you got a lot out and share it. And Gary, thank you for coming on the show. Appreciate it.

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