Things You SHOULD Know About Economic Value Added

You know, we talk about products that are investment products, so things like mutual funds or buying a stock or ETFs or, you know, whatever, these are different kinds of things that they're things that you can do with money, and they're quantified or they're called investments. But just because you're getting that doesn't mean you're investing. So today I'm here with my amazing friend Dan Allen. And Dan, we're going to talk about something really interesting, but I want to ask you a question. Is it true that if you don't use it, you lose it?

Well, I'm a living proof of that because, you know, I've lost a few things because I don't use them anymore. My muscles aren't quite as good as they used to be, Richard. So I've lost some of that muscle that I used to have since I haven't been using them enough. So I think it's true.

I love the analogy there because, you know, and one of the big, you know, the biggest muscle that we have in our. Is our brain, right? It's the muscle that needs to work. It's working all the time until you stop using it. And going to Nelson's book is what we're going to talk about Today, the page 35. So if anyone who's got Nelson's book, you know, in hand or whatever, on page 35 of becoming your own banker, and this is use it or lose it. And so Nelson's talking about in this segment, human factors, Parkinson's law, the arrival syndrome, Willie Sutton's law. So these are all things that he's. He's referencing. And if you understand these components, you're going to start to develop the mindset and the behaviors, the required behaviors to be successful as a person who wants to manage and control your own source of capital over an extended period of time. You know, when I think about an extended period of time, like I would say maybe like your lifespan. Yeah, maybe. If you're thinking the way Nelson suggested, you're trying to think 70 years down the road or, or two generations into the future, maybe you might think about controlling and, you know, having the utilization of capital for, for more than your lifespan, maybe the lifespan of your kids and your grandkids. And so, so again, there's a thought process that our brain, when you start to recognize that you can think past your own, your own grave and, and the types of things that you do shift and change materially based on the quality of your thinking and not just the quality but the frequency of your thinking. I know there's moments in times where, you know, I just want to shut my brain off. I'm just kind of like, it's, you know, it's. You ever seen, you know, what do they call, like a gerbil or something? You know, they're running on the. Is it the gerbil or a hamster that runs on the little wheel? And they, like, they have to do that. They have to get the energy out. So, like, a lot of time I just, I just imagine that's what's going on in my head. But the wheel just has ideas on the outside of it, and there's like a flashlight shining on top of all the ideas and they're just whipping past. And sometimes I just want to blurt them out, blurt them out of my mouth right away. You've, you've experienced that, I'm sure, in a few meetings that we've had, Dan. You know, so sometimes, like, I just want to turn my brain off. I want to take a break. I need to take a break. And, you know, maybe I'll use like some mindless television or like a comedy show or something to do that. But what we're talking about as far as your financial life is changing the way in which you think. And certain things need to become habitual. And your thinking is one of those things. And, and understanding that you can think about capital, the utilization of money in a way that extends past your own life. And by doing that, it starts to shift and change how you begin to use and work with capital, and how you think about preservation, how you think about security on the money, but also how you think about optimization. Optimization is a really big key, really infinite banking. I think it's a process, a method that provides optimization of your financial life. And what we're going to talk about a little bit is EVA or Economic value Add. This was really important to Nelson. He spent a decent amount of time talking about this in his live seminars. And one of the things you said right before we hit the go button, Dan, you said that EVA is something that showed up for you a lot in your, in your former life, you know, your, your, your pre infinite banking life. So I'd like to maybe just hear you, hear some commentary from you about how did that show up and, you know, what were your thoughts on it? I guess the understanding of it before infinite banking. And then, and then seeing this show up in the book and how, like, I'm curious what connections were made in the synapses of Your brain at that time.

Yeah, no, it's a great question, Richard. You know, because this is one section, it's kind of dangerous to speak about it at times with people. When you get into economic value added, a lot of people don't really understand what that is. And I had the good fortune of working in business before where, you know, we were always looking at different projects and we were running economics on those projects. And really what you were trying to do is you, you'd have a, A number of different opportunities that came along and you're going to decide, okay, where's the best place to deploy the capital or. And our energy that we have to get the best kind of rate of return for your company. So what economic value added taught us was that if we had capital that we owned like it was, it was capital we had earned and we built it up. If we use that for a project and didn't, you know, apply a value to our own money, we were missing something. And we were missing the fact that our capital had value. And if you don't account for that when you're doing your economics, you've missed something because a lot of other.

Projects or companies in different times, they borrow, they borrow to do the same thing and they automatically apply the cost of that money because they don't have a choice. They're going to be charged a cost. And what was recognized over time and this and, and if you ever want to read something and get into, you know, economic value added, what companies started to recognize is even if I had the capital, in order to really understand what projects are the best projects, you still had to apply a cost of that capital. And so when you get into the infinite banking concept and you start to, you know, read the book, I can tell you this, Richard. I was kind of amazed how many things I've learned in my business career that Nelson spoke about in his book, like Deming's Way. Like, I just go, man, I studied Deming and you know, and how he helped change outcomes for companies across the world. And it hurts in. I can read Nelson's book. And the same thing with economic value added. It just makes sense to me. So with infinite banking concept, if you are using your capital, Nelson just simply says you should be applying a value to that. It should, it should matter to you actually more then when you're borrowing someone else's pile of money and, you know, you have to pay that you should even want to pay more for use of your capital than anybody else's capital. So it resonated and connected those dots really well. Where Nelson, you know, in this section of the book, he says, he says you need to be willing to pay for the cost of using your own capital. So that's kind of how I connected those dots, Richard. And the other thing, too, as you were speaking earlier, I got thinking about, you know, use it or lose it. And that one video that we've shown multitudes of times in different events, which really helps people understand, you know, even after you start doing something, it's much easier to revert back to what you were doing before. And that's that backwards bicycle video. I just wanted to bring that up at some point.

Yeah, I really like that, like that you connected that. I mean, because that, that's one of my favorites, that video. Because it, it's a hundred percent. It has nothing to do with finance or your money or generational. Has nothing to do with any of it. It just has to do with thinking. And the thinking of, wow, I, I turn this direction and my bike goes that way. I turn it this way and my bike goes that way. And some engineer goes and, you know, plays a trick on people and he, he changes the gearing gears around so that when I go this way, the bike goes this way, you know, it goes the opposite direction. And like, your brain, like, I haven't tried one yet, but I've seen some of our colleagues, like Russ Morgan, there's a video of floating around of Russ Morgan from Wealth Without Wall Street. Funny guy. And somebody, somebody got a. I think it was Jim Oliver got a bike in front of him, and so he's trying to ride this thing. God, it cracks me up every time. But I, I would be no different. Like, there's no, I don't think there's any way that I'd be able to do it. Your brain thinks, oh, it's so simple. Like, obviously you could just figure that out. But the, the, the brain, you know, connection and the habitual connection of your life, it's really hard to break through that, that, that pattern that's been running through your life. It's a, it's like a track. I always think of it as a monster truck rally or the, the mug bog where they've got those really, you know, like, tall, but thin, deep tires with the. And they're just digging these trenches and trenches and trenches, and it's impossible to get out. Or, you know, as a farmer, obviously, I mean, you're just picturing, I'm sure you're just picturing a tractor in your head. You, because, you know, again, I'm, I'm a farm kid too. And it's like, yeah, you get stuck in the mud, like that's it, you're kind of done. Then you just have a tractor and a tractor and a tractor and a truck and they're all kind of lined up trying to pull you out. And so you get stuck in that, in that track and it's really hard to break free. And then even once you break free, if you're not careful, you could instantly slide right back into the track and you're right back where you were. So those, those, you know, metaphorically, those tracks exist in our brain and how our thinking is the only thing that gets us out of the ruts. That's it. And so Nelson focused so much on the power of thinking. And so with use it or lose it, an economic value add again, you know, one of the first things that Nelson says in here is the common mistakes for people who don't implement this right is that they don't make it a way of life.

Right.

You know, the most managers try to implement it too fast. In other words, they don't have a longevity mindset or they're not thinking about the. This might take a little bit of time for us to get used to acclimatizing to this idea. The boss lacks conviction. So they're talking about, in a business circumstance, well, if we're talking about your money and your banking system, who's the boss? It's you. If you lack conviction, you're going to run into some problems. And you know, managers fuss too much. Okay? So that's, you know, that's the noise. That's the noise out in the world coming at you and, and people, you know, chitting at your ear that are trying to get you to go do it the old fashioned way. And you're just trying to forge ahead a new path and that training gets short shrift. So what that means is that there's not enough influence or there's not enough energy or effort applied to the necessity of training. And so that, that's where, like coaching, having a coach, an infinite banking coach on your side, having a community that you can be around watching good videos like this, these kinds of things that you're able to, you know, be mindful, be cognizant because you are working on you. You know, I don't know about anyone else, but I'm a work in progress. You know, like I'm, I'm no Van Gogh, okay? I might be a doodle that Maybe my, my five year old Drew. And you know, maybe it's progressively getting better each year, I'd like to think, but you know, so we're all a work in progress and I, I want to focus on learning more and getting better and training and, and focusing on my thinking. And every once in a while when you really have these moments, you're just like, it's like you get hit by a brick to the side of the head when all of a sudden a thought just like locks in and you're like, oh my God, that's been running around and bouncing around in my noggin for a while. And all of a sudden it just crystallized. And all of a sudden it's like you can, you're seeing through a perfectly clear window that just got cleaned with Windex and you're on the other side of it. And so when it comes to IBT and implementing this process in your life, even something like the use it or lose it economic value and principle, because most people, unless they're, you know, an entrepreneur that were involved in like big scale large projects, the kind of projects you were talking about, Dan, they're not really familiar with this. They might intuitively kind of maybe know it or think that that makes sense, but they've actually never applied it or they never been a part of those meetings they haven't looked at. We're talking about, you know, companies looking at investing millions and millions and millions of dollars on a large scale project that it's going to take them a really long time to get their capital back. The capital sitting there, it's good. They're going to drain it down to zero and then they're putting it all at risk and they're waiting for this return out in the future. So they want to make sure when that capital comes back, it better come back with friends. And if they calculate the numbers to assess the risk of an interest rate on their own capital, then they're recognizing, hey, you know what? It doesn't work at that interest rate, this project won't work at that interest rate. Which means they got to make an advanced decision that we shouldn't be putting our capital into that deal yet. Because if it wouldn't work if we had to go borrow someone else's money, it sure as heck ain't going to work. If we drain all of our resources dry, we will be under capitalized. That's when a business can fail. And further to that, this is what I was thinking about based on something you said. So taking that idea of, you know, again, paying interest to yourself, charging yourself a rate for the things that you do with your own capital. Well, I didn't go and work to go and get the capital for ABC Bank. I didn't go work to build their capital pile. Yeah, I probably funded some money in it over the years, but I wasn't working my tail off to go and get them money. I've been working my tail off to go get whose capital? Mine. So I'm working.

Work to try and build up my resources of capital, which means I put all the effort in and it wasn't easy. So if I'm going to go put my capital to work someplace else, wouldn't I naturally want to charge more for the use of my capital because I had to work like a rented mule to go and acquire it. If you just think about that for a moment, just, just take a pause and just think about how hard you've worked throughout your human existence to get what you've got to have whatever it is that you have. I don't care if it's this much money or if it's this much money or if it's equity and houses or real estate or business. I don't, I don't care. Just think about how much you had to work, the time, the education, the late nights, the seminars you went to and all the things you've been doing. And wouldn't you agree that you worked harder than somebody else to go and accomplish that? And if you want to just go and access money from a third party vendor or link, all you got to do is maybe work at some paperwork. You just got to, just got to supply them some qualifying paperwork. Yeah, there's a little bit of work that goes in, but once you get the money that works over, whereas the other stuff that you've got, you're always working for that. You're always working that pile of money. So you should naturally be charging yourself more for the usage of the capital that you, you, you got blood, sweat and tears into its creation.

Yeah. Now that's well said. And as you were speaking, Richard, I just was thinking about Nelson and some of this, you know, the teaching that he provided to anybody that would, you know, that listened to his message and, and it kind of builds off the same thing, you know, you know, you can even add to it if you want after. But I was just thinking of when, you know, he talked about, say you do something different because you have the capacity to do it now because you're practicing the infinite banking concept and you're building up your own pile of capital and you go, okay, so now I'm no longer buying collision insurance on my vehicles. I'm just putting liability insurance on. So what did Nelson always coach us to do with that money? Well, he didn't want you to go off and just bend it willy nilly. He wanted you to start putting that into your wealth. So he says, you start, you take that difference and you put it into your own banking system. Build more capital, build more capital. He was always thinking about, you know, what's best for you, not only today and the money that you're going to, you know, have access to the capital you'll have access to during your life, Stan, but the next generation and the generation after that. The difference that you can make just by making that change because at some point you changed something in your life. And he just saying, well, don't just now not recognize the value you've brought by, you know, wasting it. Put it to work, put it to a place where it's going to grow uninterrupted for you for the rest of your life or potentially on someone else's life, depending on how your system's structured. And I just thought, you know, isn't that about user lose it and really use or lose it is about human behaviors. What's it, you know, I always think about that whole group that he, that he talks about in his book about something we're all going to have to deal with. And I loved how you went to, you know, analogy of, you know, your work in progress because we are, we're all a work in progress. And you know, and I, and I love the fact that even doing this, you know, here's one of the things that, that I'll do as a practitioner and somebody that, you know, lives this every day of my life pretty much because I never stopped thinking about it. It becomes a way of life for me. But there's times where I go listen to someone else, I go listen to Nelson speak again because I still need to learn more. I need to keep learning about this. I go listen to some of my colleagues and I listen to, you know, experiences that our clients have had and things that they're learning. And it just helps me on this journey of how can I adopt more of what Nelson intended in his book, which is, you know, just a phenomenal resource to go to. And the more you read it, the more you're going to see. You didn't see. And if you don't have a copy of this book and you Happen to be watching us today. Well, I'm going to encourage you to, you know, to get a copy. You can do that a multitude of ways. Our website, you know, easy to get access, about as economical place. You can buy a book in the, in the world. And you'll never regret spending that $26 or something like that on your education.

I think the book is a perfect example of that. And in life, we get really excited about stuff. I know I'm a pretty excitable kind of guy. I'm like, oh my God, look, blue car, right? And, you know, easily distracted. There's people that you probably know in your life and maybe you're one of these people. I don't know. And I know in the past I was, I've been like this, where you would see something, get really excited, or maybe it's a new opportunity or business idea and you're just like, how, you know, hot and bothered about going and attacking this new thing, the shiny object syndrome. But then that energy wanes. It doesn't, you know, maybe it's not being successful right away or you don't get the results fast enough. Whatever it is, the energy wanes and then something new comes along and you jump ship and you're onto something new. And so for people that are discovering this concept and Nelson's work, maybe this video, maybe some of our other content or the podcast or whatever, and, and you might have that excitement level, which is great. We absolutely want to encourage you. The last thing we want to do is like, you know, turn down your level of excitement. But we can't clarify enough that sometimes when you're so excited, we need to pump the brakes just a little bit because our exuberance can almost overtake some of the subtleties that we're trying to help people understand. And then when you get, when you jump into something, sometimes because of the excitement, not because of the understanding, then you might run the risk. And I say might that two, three years down the road, something new comes along, getting really clear on what the problem is that you're solving. When infinite bank is solving for you. Understanding the fundamentals that this is, you know, again, right here, it's on the page. Economic value add. What are the common mistakes? They don't make it a way of life. And further on down here, Nelson says, just like Eva, to be effective, the infinite banking concept must become a way of life. You must use it or lose it. What he's really meaning is like, it's not that you're gonna like, if you Start an insurance contract, you're gonna lose the insurance contract. Well, if you don't pay the premium, yeah. I mean, that can happen, but you're not necessarily getting all of the intrinsic value or possible value that could come from your system if you're not putting it to work in your life in some way. And I'll give you an example of that. So just a real quick, simple one. You've got someone's paying home and auto insurance and they're doing that every month. And maybe they've got, maybe they're paying for their, their teenage kid. And there's, you know, there's spouses, there's a couple cars. And so you add all that, maybe there's a couple of rental properties. So you add all these things up and that starts to become a larger and larger line item. Well, generally, not always time, but generally when you pay those annually, you usually get a discount. Sometimes that discount can be pretty high. So if I borrow from my policy system, my money's still growing. I didn't take the money out. I'm using collateral. I'm using the power of leverage. My money is continuing to grow. I'm accessing capital from the insurance company's pile of money. I'm using opm, other people's money. I'm now paying this insurance company or insurance companies over here for the home and auto annually. I take the exact same payment or maybe I even add five or ten dollars to the payment. If I was sending them 250 bucks for, you know, a couple of, you know, property and a couple of cars every month, is it okay if I pay myself 260amonth? Am I, is the 10 extra dollars going to make much of a difference? Probably not. I set up an automatic payment going back to the policy. I'm paying myself a slightly higher amount than I was paying this insurance company. And now I've discounted the price I'm paying those guys. So the net effect is I'm actually paying them less money. So the financial energy I'm controlling that's going back to my system is more. If I put an extra $10 on it, most people aren't going to notice the difference on an extra $10 a month. We don't notice it when we go to Tim Hortons or any of the things, any of the things you've probably done today. If you're watching this video and if you, but if you commit that and you set up as an auto payment, that means that $10 that would have otherwise disappeared to some Frivolous crap in your life isn't doing that anymore. It's being warehoused in your system. And if you start doing that in a lot of areas of your life, the impact becomes dramatic over time. That's the subtlety of what we're doing. One portion of this is like a forced savings mechanism, but another portion of it is just optimizing an efficiency of your money. And by making sure you're being clear on your intent and you're getting the practice of doing it, you, as you see results, then you want more of that. It's just like going to the gym. Like you said, you go to the gym, you start to see some results. I mean, oh, Jesus, looking pretty good, trunks on, you know, like, you, you want more of that, you, you naturally get motivated to continue. Whereas if you don't see that same result or you're not engaged, then your brain starts to go off looking for other things again, which means you weren't really clear on your understanding of the process and you're not making it a way of life.

Yeah, no, I think that's really good. Share, Richard. Just for helping people understand. And it's, you know, as you, you think of both those behaviors and we're all going to have opportunities in life. We don't know what those are, but I suspect you, like, I have people who got into this, just like you said, they were all excited and they're, they're just pumped and they're going to make this a difference. And then you meet with them a year later and you say, so, yeah, you got some, you got some good opportunities here based on how you've capitalized your system. Let's talk about putting it to work for you like you were speaking about. And they go, yeah, yeah, I should do that. I really should do that. They don't, you know, they just don't take that next step and the next, you know, six months or a year later, you meet with them again and you're getting some really good opportunities. So to me, that's like, they've got excited. They really understood what they wanted to do differently for their family, but they're not using it. And even above and beyond what Nelson's really talking about here, too, which is, you know, as you use this process, make sure you're, you know, you think about, you know, there's a cost of your capital whenever you deploy, make sure you apply that. And you did a great job explaining how easy it is because even banks have adopted processes where you can sign up for an account where every time you use that debit card, they put an extra, you know, 50 cents into a savings for you. And it's kind of, you know, they figured that out. Those things do little steps over time. You know, how do you eat an elephant? Well, one bite at a time. How do you build a wall one brick at a time? And so those little things Nelson was always talking about, you want to be thinking about your wealth and how do you keep building your wealth and the opportunities are there for us to utilize simple methods of doing that. And the first thing, I coach the clients that are, you know, just looking there and, and, you know, paying their premiums, God bless them, they've been good about paying the premiums and building that. But I just go like, boy, are you missing out on opportunities. I know you're missing out on opportunities. And some people have a, a clear cut objective. They want to build up so much capital before they start to use it, but other people just haven't started to use it. And so because they're not using it, they really don't understand the advantage that they're going to get when they start to use it. And that's the part that, you know, a different kind of way to look at it. But there are people that are, you know, doing a good job of capitalization and then just not simply using it. And I don't know if you've come across that or not in your career, Richard.

Oh, yeah. And, and also, I mean, you know, even sometimes the first times people read Nelson's book, like, he doesn't, he doesn't have, you know, capital utilization happening for like at least five years, five to seven years. And he makes statements that, you know, like, you know, you should be capitalizing for at least this period of time. What he's really saying is you should be committed to, to capitalization. And it doesn't mean that you can't use it earlier. He just wants people to understand that it's okay to let capital build for a while. So as it's accumulating, you might see new opportunities because of the size of your reservoir. And additionally he, he said he would say that. Show me someone who has capitalized and paid a premium for seven years and not touched it, and I will show you someone who has conquered Parkinson's law. So he wasn't saying you can't do it or don't do it or he wasn't okay if you did it. He was simply saying if you can do this, if you do A, B and C, you have Demonstrated mastery, mastery over conquering Parkinson's law in your financial life. And there's nothing wrong with being a master at anything, right? Unless it's a master of procrastination. That's probably so. But you know, it's, you know, it's interesting. Again, people, we, we love the book. We talk about the book all the time. Of course, there's so much gold. And we'll probably revisit this page and have new thoughts and new ideas one year from now. But speaking of books, there's a quick announcement that I want to make and some people already know this. I made a post about it the other day and Dan, you're familiar, but hot off the presses, I've got a copy of our new book, Jason, and my new book for the podcast, Canadians guide to building a wealth without risk, the process of becoming your own banker. And this book we do have, there's going to, there's a couple charts, not too many, but there's some images and things where we've got the odd drawing, so it's printed in color. There's some, there's some colored images and stuff that help, you know, expand on some of the concepts that we talk about. And this is no replacement for Nelson's book. Nothing, nothing ever replaces Nelson's book. We, we, we make homage to Nelson's book in here, of course, and we still recommend it. But for some people maybe looking for an entry level book or they're not maybe, you know, not ready to take on Nelson, some, some people get scared by the charts or whatever, this is going to be a really good book to help for people at that stage or even just to enhance some of your own understanding. You know, there's a couple great stories in here and we're actually working on our second book as well, which we're hoping to be able to release before the end of the year. And so we're, we're going to be doing an official launch and we're going to have a pretty good discounted price coming up tentatively. I mean, we haven't locked down the date yet, but it's probably going to be like August 30th or 31st to be determined. But we're going to have a special pricing window where people will be able to get the, the Kindle version of that book for, you know, about, about a buck basically, you know, at a vast discount. So we'll be sending out some notifications to our email list about that. If you want to know when the book's coming out, go Ahead and leave a, leave a comment here if you're, if you're on our, like in the wealth of Bay street community page or you know, the, you know, on the wealth of Facebook page, we'll be making posts about it when it goes live at that point as well. We're really excited about it and we've got some great feedback from the book so far and it's, we're just really happy. It's been, it's been a bit of a journey. We're about 18 months down the line here. We, we thought we'd have it out about a year ago, but there's some things, a couple things got in the way there, growing a business and whatever. But anyway, we're pretty excited about it, so hopefully people will enjoy the book and get a lot of value in. And another comment I wanted to make too. We've been talking about capital and capitalization and these are words that we use a lot. And I think the best person who explains capital and what it is other than, other than Nelson, you know, because Nelson, I, I didn't know this, but Ryan Griggs said he counted it and the word capital is mentioned like 57 times or something in the book. But Ryan Griggs is amazing guy. He's a very, very smart person. He's actually, I think he's working on a, I guess a dissertation around Austrian capital theory. One of his medium blog posts, which talks about, you know, again, understanding capital. What do we mean when we say capital? And as well, we had an interview, we've done a couple interviews on the podcast with Ryan which are a ton of fun. It's always fun. And he, you know, he talks a lot about what does capital mean, how does it show up in your life. And ultimately he did a presentation at a think tank conference. It was his first time presenting at the think tank. And this was, Nelson was still around, this was in 2018, maybe 20, 2018 or something. And he talked about this, you know, this capital theory and everything. But one of the things he did is he mentioned, you know, ultimately capital or capitalization is the opposite or it's the antithesis of investment. Investment is the deaccumulation of capital to go and do something essentially. And, and so, and opportunities come to those who are well capitalized. So if you have no money or no access to capital, no access to liquidity, the opportunities you can access are pretty small or, or non existent. Whereas if you have, you know, 500 grand in the bank, all of a sudden the opportunities that start showing up that you can, because your brain is attuned to what you might be able to do. Opportunities start flocking to you, and the quality or the caliber of them begins to rise. And you can start to cherry pick, right? So you can start to, you know, pick the ones that make the most sense for you. And another thing Nelson said, and he would do this certainly in the seminars, I don't know if it's in the book specifically in this, these words, but he would say an investment should only be in something that you know a great deal about. Anything else is speculation. So, you know, we talk about products that are investment products. So things like mutual funds or buying a stock or ETFs or, you know, whatever, these are different kinds of things that they, they're things that you can do with money and they're quantified or they're called investments. But just because you're getting that doesn't mean you're investing. If you don't know what the hell that is and you have no earthly idea how to even watch it or whether you should have your money in there or not or, or any of that stuff, that's not investing. That is speculation. Just because you might own that tool or that product doesn't mean squat. Investing is only when you know a great deal about something. So the number one thing you should be investing in, in my opinion, is you invest in this, your knowledge, your understanding, and then in things you already know, usually in stuff that you're already trained at or familiar with, like if you know how to bake cakes and you're like a cake boss, which, fantastic, great for you. You know, maybe the best investment for you is actually in better baking equipment so you can start turning out cakes in your kitchen and making a good profit. You probably make more money off of that than you would by taking, you know, $10,000 and throwing it in, you know, putting a blindfold on and whipping darts at a stock market board and picking some, you know, a couple, three letters off the wall that you want to put your money into. So just, just consider that you are the best investment in your life and, and stick to things that you know and then expand on the fringes of what you know. Or if there's something that is really interesting to you, where you already have a natural desire to learn, your brain and your gut telling you that this is an area that maybe you should dig into more. And then where can you find a way to generate revenue in that zone? Revenue or profits?

I just want to leave you with one thought, not simply use it or lose it.

Awesome. Well, you know, continue your journey of gobbling up some good information. Once we we end this video, there's probably another one that's going to pop up right away. Thanks for joining us today and as always, find a way that you can become your own banker. Cheers.