399: Don't Let Wall Street Control Your Retirement | We Can Help!

Wake up, America. Take control of your retirement.

Because a lot of people say, well, what should I invest in until I have enough to really self direct?

Let's pay attention to this money. It is a huge piece. There's 35 trillion in retirement accounts in the US and it can get whittled away by Wall Street. If you're not watching out, and if you think they're watching out for you, you are wrong.

Set up a system for at least some basic savings.

Welcome everyone to the Main Street Business Podcast. We are so excited for today's episode. I'm Matt Sorenson, joined by the amazing, the illustrious, the man, the myth, the legend, Mark J. Kohler.

Well, thank you so much. I appreciate that. We've got a great topic today, folks. If you are frustrated with Wall street, you are not alone. Do you control your retirement or are you just hoping Wall street figures it out? Serious problem with a lot of investors is they don't even know what is in their retirement account.

Right.

And we need to take control of that. Wall street has got fees at every turn. It's smoke and mirrors on what the actual returns are. We're here today to talk about how you can better understand and control your retirement and get massive returns. Investing in what you know best. And Wall street does not like this podcast. This is why I wrote the book what Wall street isn't telling you. Bam.

Yeah, we're telling it to you today though. Okay? We're gonna give you the facts, the cold hard facts, and try to educate everyone on what you should be doing, how you should get in control of your finances and your retirement. So many people save stock money away in an IRA or 401k and can't even tell you what it's invested in. And they've really just let Wall street control it because it was easy. They checked a box on a form and they have some target date fund. They don't even know what the heck it is with massive fees draining the returns that they're getting or really limiting them. And they've just been lazy. So like wake up America. Take control of your retirement. Okay? Your retirement is going to suck if you don't get on it.

And let's full disclosure and disclaimer. We are not financial advisors telling you what to invest in. We are not selling you anything today. We're not promoting a fund in some big real estate project. We don't have some private placement on the side that we're trying to get you to click down below and give us your money. We are not Doing that. What we have is a trust company. And what we've been working with for years are other trust companies, until we launched our own about four to five years ago, that you can move your retirement account into and invest it the way you want with fees that are infinitesimal, tiny compared to the fees that Wall street nails you with. And you get to control your retirement and invest it. And we're going to explain how that happens today. So that's the show. We're going to kill it.

Yeah, we'll unpack some of that that Mark said. I mean, that is like. There's so much detail on that. And I don't want to get too technical, but, guys, this is. The average fee for a 401k is one and a half percent. You got $100,000 in a 401k, you're paying $1,500 in fees. A lot of people don't even realize it, but go check it out. Stephen Colbert has a video on this about the average fees for 401ks. It's actually hilarious. But this is a reality. Wall street, and they are taking it out. They're nickeling and diming you on every little thing that amounts to a lot of money.

At the end of the day, number one, I'm going to. And as we go back to these is we kind of got our foundation there of our basic accounts. The IRAs, the Roths, the HSAs, covered all that you can control. Keep that in the back of your mind, number one. Step one for me is do a little audit. What do you have? Yeah, many people don't even know what they have, what the account numbers are, where they're at. You get mail all the time, you throw it away or whatever. You don't even care because it's painful to look at. Create a spreadsheet just on Google sheets or a little Excel sheet and say, here's the three or four accounts. I have, my significant other, the kids, whatever. Here's the accounts, here's the account numbers and what's in them, meaning dollar amount. And then if you have a little note section, try to start figuring out what are they invested in. Even you can take a gander at maybe what the fees could be. But it's a lot of smoke and mirrors. It is not easy to find what they're invested in. We're going to come back to that. But I'd say, number one, just do an audit. Any recommendations on that?

Yeah, I love that. Think of your old employer, 401ks. That could be laying around, know where those are and maybe you need to move some of that money to places again, lower fees. 401ks in particular have some of the largest fees unfortunately. So I love that.

Okay, now number and I want to talk about fees and what the. Because a lot of people say, well what should I invest in until I have enough to really self direct? So we'll come to that. Number two, I like what Matt just said. There is once you have an audit of what you have, set up a system for at least some basic savings. Now this is where Matt and I like to argue. To be honest. He's got incredible self discipline. He's going to go every week and he's going to save in his retirement account at work. Get the match. I have articles on the matching out strategy. Another topic but Matt's very self disciplined with that. I think the average American sucks at saving and I'm one of them. Okay. So if you feel like you suck at savings, you're on my team. So what I love is some of those easier apps that make life simple for saving. Acorns being a powerful one because with Acorns and some of the bigger brokerage houses are caught onto this and so they're up in their game with their apps. But Acorns really pioneered this. And acorns think of a little squirrel and you're gonna put away the acorns in the tree. Okay. And what they do at Acorns that I love is you can program your bank account to put into savings into any of these types of accounts. 50 bucks a week, $20 a week. You'd say I'm gonna not go get that extra coffee in the afternoon. I'm gonna save that $5 or $10 every day depending. I'm going to save a little bit every week with an auto deposit. Then you can do roundups. I love roundups at the bank. Where was I at Walgreens yesterday and someone said, you want to round up? I go, nope, I'm already rounding up my roundups go into my Roth. So roundups and weekly deposits. These apps can just get that. What do you now that's the basic work crappy savior, savers crowd. What do you recommend to just getting in a system for start saving?

I think saving. Just think you're always going to be saving. I mean maybe you hit retirement, you're in this, you know, you've accumulated your assets and now you're just living off of them. But really in all these phases you're really saving. It's Just how much. So at first, if it seems small, that's okay, you're going to be saving more later. But if you get in the habit of it, it's kind of like if you want to run 25 miles, well, you don't just get out of the gate and run 25, you might need to start running 1, 2, 3. And as you get the financial discipline and you think of other ways how to make more money, bring in more wealth, budget better, you know, and there's different phases of life and marriage and kids and all these things that put pressures on these, these factors. But just get in the habit of saving. Just like I'm a person who saves just like that and be like, damn it, I'm a person who saves. And that is who you are. And do it.

I love it. I thought I'm going to use the snowball effect kind of as a term here. And that's emotional and financial because when you start saving even $10 a week, it snowballs. Dave Ramsey is a big proponent of snowballing your debt down, but also snowballing your savings up. Because you start saving, that rate of return compounds. I love this little example of $1,000 in the bank. $1,000. And you know, how does it grow every year on compounding? But there's also an emotional snowball effect because like Matt said, you kind of get excited, you start to see these accounts grow, you kind of get addicted to it. You're like, I'm a saver, dammit. And so you want to get on that emotional high. And I think that's a big one. Okay, so number one, do an audit. Number two, tackle saving and have a system. Number three, until you can really self direct and maybe get the bigger returns that we love to talk about. You may say, well, I only got 2 grand or 5 grand or 20 grand or 50 grand and I don't have a lot of options to invest that right now. I'm busy in my life. My lifestyle doesn't allow me to really hyper focus on that small business I want to invest to or down the street or the real estate, but I need to invest in something and you guys tell me wall sucks and there's all these fees. Where's the happy medium? And I think you alluded to this with choosing mutual funds that have either zero fees on the front load backload. Do you want to explain something like where would you put your money with low fees?

Well, what I just do, and I think what's a good one is just find the. I just do the s and P500. Again, this isn't investment advice. This is pretty kind of like default investing. Unfortunately a lot of like plans that you might be in have a default investment vehicle. Like if you're like your 401k at work, if you're saving in there, their default vehicle might be a target date fund that's like well if you're 30, we're going to put you in a fund that assumes you're going to save for another 30 years. We're going to risk rate that based on all these things and all these people are going to make money on it. Okay, maybe. But there's a ton of funds that are just mutual funds. Fidelity has one. I mean all the big companies have one that basically model the s and P500 which is the 500. You know it's 500 companies that supposed to represent the American economy or the national or sorry the American. The economy. Let's just say that okay, they're mostly all big companies that have been around for a long time now. There's also just the, the in the index fund Spy. With Spy, that's the S&P 500. And so a lot of people, even a lot of our sophisticated clients when they're between other stuff, they're buying this or they might be buying some other things. And so they're like I'm just parking my money here. And this is a great strategy for people that are just starting to accumulate. You've got enough savings where you're like Alright, I got 500 bucks. A thousand bucks. Let me tinkering to invest it with. You might move there and you might be there a while. You might be there in between other investments until you find better deals that can beat that.

I love it. And this may be a. We're going to come back to this management of your advisor because at this point you're having to make some decisions. Do you rely on an advisor? Do you not? What do I choose? And I love the word you use Matt. Default investing. Now my co author of my book the Business Owner's Guide to Financial Freedom. And we're going to go to this in a moment in chapter three and talk about advisors. My co author is Randy Luebke, registered

financial investment advisor representative.

Yeah, that's right. I get all. He's got more initials behind his name than I do. Rma, cwpp, cmp, Investment advisor Rep. He's got it all. But in what I love Randy. I just talked to him the other day. We had a client on a Mutual phone call. And he said, this is an investment advisor that has a fiduciary duty to recommend what's best for his clients. Only 5% on average. And this is in Tony Robbins book, have the same duty of a fiduciary duty to recommend what's best for his clients. He told my client on the call and I loved it. He goes, I don't like investing in Wall Street. This isn't a financial advisor. He goes, it's a place you park your money until you find a better place to put it. And have you ever had your financial advisor say that? Yeah, I was like, randy, I love you. And he's like, so that default investing is where do I put things until I can get a better, better rate of return in a real estate project, in a small business, in some crypto or whatever your flavor. So I love that. Just choosing something that has very low fees. It's going to get average rates of returns. No load funds. Some of you may have heard of no load funds. You're not paying up front.

Yeah. And I think on saving, remember, I mean you're in a bank account that's paying you nothing. I mean you're lucky if you're in a percent on your savings account at a bank. And because inflation's going up and the Fed's raising rates, you might be getting a little bit better right now. But you know, that is not what you can get. At least get in the stock market job. Now there's risks, of course, in being in the stock market. It's been a roller coaster. S&P 500 is down this year. Okay, so this is also not short term investing. And I'm not saying just buy the S&P 500. I'm just giving that as a common, easy example. But get in the game a little bit. Get out of. I'm just letting my money be parked at a bank that's going to pay me nothing. And you know, which means you're losing money sometimes. We love the banks either. But okay, now we're at Wall street here, but we're being strategic, we're being smart. We're aware of the risks and we're looking at the track record. Look at the history, look at the stuff. Don't take big swings. You're not a home run hitter. Just focus on saving and investing.

I love it. Now a couple additional thoughts on this is when you're this back to the acorns point and Matt jokes about this, he's like, okay, you put $50 a week in Acorns. Where's your money? There. It's only a parking spot until I move it to a better investment. So number four is moving into this now. I'm going to be doing strategic investing. Before it was kind of this default investing. I'm just going to park it. I want low fees. I want to see if I can get 5, 7, 8, 9% return. It's going to be long term stuff. I, I'm not in a hurry. I've got this saving strategy and I'm coupling it with this default investing. Now in step four, we're getting strategic and we're going, okay, now I've taken, I got five grand in my acorns. I got 10 grand in this Roth over here. I've got 10, 15 grand over here. How can I kind of pool that together? Do something a little, a better rate of return. And this is where we get into the topic of self directing. Let me point out this book here for those on podcasting portal.

He's picking up the best book in the world.

Yeah, the second best book. Well, I've written three books, so this would be the fourth best book.

It's titled doesn't even get a medal. I'm like, not even on the podium.

Well, you know, you write three books, you can get on the podium. Okay, so the self directed IRA Handbook, written by this amazing co host, Matt Sorensen, second edition. This book, I mean, this is meaty. I mean, I will say this. I think it is longer and has more footnotes than any of my books. He put so much work into it. That was a compliment. Okay, you're welcome.

It's long.

Yeah. If you can't sleep at night, this is your choice. No, but if you're new to this topic, we have a sister podcast. This book is great. But Matt, I am teeing it up for you. There's plenty of resources to learn more, but in 90 seconds tell us what the concept is of self Direct. Now we're going to get more deep here. For many of our listeners that are regular listeners, hang tight. I want to give you some kick ass strategies. But for those that are new, what would you say in 90 seconds explains that concept.

So the self directed IRA or 401K is essentially retirement account that you can invest in what you want. So when you have an IRA or 401k with Wall street, let's say you're at Fidelity or TD Ameritrade or any of those financial institutions. Goldman Sachs, who cares? You can buy what they sell like they're Financial institutions, they sell financial products. So what can your IRA or 401k buy when you have an account with them? What they sell.

Oh, but you can self direct it at TD Ameritrade.

You can self direct it and decide which stock you want to buy. Stocks that are on the stock exchange. Yeah, it's kind of like you have anything you want as long as it's in our store. You know, it's like I'm, I'm at McDonald's and I actually want a burrito, you know, and it's not a, not a breakfast burrito, like a burrito. Okay, well, you can have burritos, you just not get them at McDonald's. So you need to get to a provider of accounts, like directed ira.

Like Cheesecake Factory. Like,

you want Chinese, you want cheesecake, anything you want. You want fajitas, but we got it all.

We got a menu from hell, you know, so.

Oh my God. And by the way, for someone like me that has a hard time making decisions on a menu, I mean, that menu is overwhelming. I'm like, do I want this or that? I'm like five pages back. Oh, that was a good one. Back.

It's like the world market of restaurants.

Anyways, so the most common thing people are doing with these self directed IRAs is they're buying real estate. They're buying a rental property, they're flipping a property, they're doing an Airbnb, they're investing in an LLC with some other people buying a small apartment building or a commercial building.

All right, okay, that's number one. Let's do this. And for some of our more regular listeners, you might like to hear, I asked Matt the other day, could you do a report out of directed ira, which now has a billion dollars of self directed accounts. What are most people doing?

Real estate.

Number one is real estate.

Real estate.

Can I guess number two, syndications. Yep.

Number two syndications are private placements. So people investing in a fund that could be doing lots of different things.

Yeah, that would be, for example, for some of you, that's someone's putting together a fund to go do a ten million dollar building and you're like, I want to be in real estate, but I don't have time to chase down a fourplex and manage it myself or hire a property manager. Because with IRAs too, you've got some management hurdles if you're trying to do it yourself. So syndications, like one of the bigger ones a lot of our clients are familiar with is like Grant Cardone. He's out there on his 22nd building and he'll put together a fund and people are like, hey, I can put a thousand dollars of my Roth in that. Yeah.

Or a lot of the big real estate places, even from, like, bigger pockets. Brandon Turner's got one. Meet Kevin's got one. A lot of these people in the.

Pomp has one.

Yeah, Pomp has one in crypto, you know, and so they have funds that people can invest in. And there's different types of this. And whether you're a credit or not, there's lots of varieties of this, but that's the second most common is just investing in private funds. Sometimes they're startups, sometimes it's a private equity fund. You know, there's GoFundMe varieties.

Yeah. All of those would fall under this. If you want to do a GoFundMe type thing or. And again, you go to TD Ameritrade, get on their app. Those funds aren't listed. So how do you get in them? Well, we're going to give some practical steps here of the. What you do to get there. And again, our podcast has some directed IRA podcast. Yeah, the directed IRA podcast with links down in the description. So syndications number two, number three. Now this is in. I've got five steps here. We're going to do step five here in a moment, but step four is strategic investing. And I was asking Matt what the. The big ones are. Number three. Okay, I want to guess. Here, let me. Real estate syndications, number three.

Notes, probably. Notes. Yep.

Would you go with. So loaning people money?

Yeah, most secured notes, I'd say 90% of that. Secured notes or trustee notes. So you're basically a private money lender. You're the hard money lender, but you're just using your retirement account to do it.

Okay.

Getting interest and points back on it.

Number four. Can I go with crypto? Yep.

It's probably crypto right now.

Crypto and crypto used to be a little higher.

Crypto is maybe two or three, you know, six months ago, but it's. We're in crypto winter right now, so.

Yeah, and. And there's some fun things there. One of the ones, just a couple examples. I've been on some calls this last web3 is still. There is a lot of people still working and building the metaverse and the crypto infrastructure. And cryptocurrency and tokens are still alive. They're just down in value right now. Hell, Wall Street's down in value. So don't think crypto's gone away. It'll be back. As usual, one of the funniest ones. Matt and I were teaching a class and this woman is like, well, yeah, I can buy some tokens in crypto, but I'm taking my retirement account. I formed an llc and I'm in some of the meta. Some of the. What do you call the platforms that are defi. Defi wallets. And so they're doing some of these wallets. A metamask wallet, for example, would be one of the biggest defi wallets out there. And she goes, I'm buying spaceships in a video game and renting those and making money on my retirement account owning spaceships in an online video game. And this woman was actually quite attractive, too. She stood up and asked this question, and I think every guy in there fell off his chair, was like, what are you doing? You're doing this in your retirement account? She's like, oh, yeah. So this week I've got clients that are buying weapons and undead blocks, clients that are buying real estate and upland in their retirement accounts. So people buying virtual real estate and renting it. It's just unbelievable. So there's a lot going on.

There's a lot of options, a lot of risk in those, of course, you know, and that's the thing where it's like we're just telling what people are doing, right? Saying go, do.

Yeah, yeah, of course. So after crypto, so anyway, I get excited, but that's why I like to talk about it. So I'm not telling you people to go do it. What I want you to do is open your mind. I could do that. Okay. Number five, after crypto, I'm going to go with small business people that are just like, I want to buy a new.

Yeah, it's like my friends opening up, you know, I mean, one of the ones that's been really successful here, I've just seen the accounts pretty large now was just. Was the cash partner based in a Wild Buffalo Wings. Buffalo Wild Wings franchise does it.

I love it.

And it gets great cash flow and it's got a pretty big, big account now, so. But it could be any small business, you know, in your community or elsewhere. You've got somebody that you want to be the cash partner. You could use your retirement account.

I'm kind of getting hungry now. Yeah, I love the.

Some wings. I do.

I want some. I like the boneless wings with like all the different sauces. The garlic. Garlic parmesan.

Okay.

It's not too hot. I can't do the habanero. Those are.

No, you're not in the hospital.

No, no, I can't do that. Okay, so we're getting strategic real estate syndications, notes, crypto, small business. What's the grab bag? What else would we kind of bring in? Oh, precious metals.

Yeah, precious metals.

Gold, silver.

Yeah, you can buy gold, silver, platinum, palladium. Those are the four qualifying precious metals. There's certain purity requirements you got to meet on those. There's a whole chapter in my book on diamonds.

Can I buy diamonds?

You cannot buy diamonds. Really? Yeah.

Well, they saw blood diamond with it's going to fall under DiCaprio and they said we can't do that.

Yeah. So the IRS prohibits certain collectibles in general from your retirement account. Owning that and that's an important thing. There's only three types of assets that are prohibited in a retirement account. Collectibles, which would include like diamonds or like a stamp collection or art.

Yeah, I love your wine collections.

Yeah, well the problem was everybody had a wine collection in their IRA and it ended up in a bottle collection. So. So Congress nixed that. But. But you've got.

So you can't collect life insurance.

Can't do life insurance and you can't own corporation stock. Oh yeah.

Is that number four? Anything that's illegal by the feds?

Yeah, anything illegal now we're going to see. I mean there's been bills really close to passing on legalizing marijuana at the federal level. So we have lots of clients that want to invest in marijuana, you know, cannabis related companies. Now hemp, we have quite a bit of clients invested into hemp because that was federally legalized a couple years ago. But cannabis, you know, it's still despite the states giving licenses to people say that they can sell it. The federal government saying we're actually it's a felony. We're going to put you in prison for 20 years if you do it. So there's this, you know, we're in this weird spot with cannabis, but yeah.

And it's hard to open a bank account for your retirement account when they ask what are you doing to do with it? Oh, I'm going to buy, you know, into some sort of dispensary. But we have a clients that will buy the real estate.

Yeah.

That is renting to the cannabis farm.

We have it in multiple. But even the retail centers we've have clients that they bought the real estate that they leased to a. Just a retail sales place. There's a lot of permitting and licensing has to happen There. But we've had clients do it that successfully. That's okay.

Or.

Yeah, just actual like the farming land that the cannabis is planted on and harvested, you know.

And on this small business one, it was fun. We had a client in Texas that took his retirement account and was buying these Honky Tonk. You're just killing it with bars and liquor licenses. I think of all the light he went through and he was just killing it doing bands and he had a chain of about 10 to 20 honky tonks. It's kind of cool name.

Yeah. I mean, Myri's invested in Honky Tonks.

Who wants to say, okay, let me.

If I can take a step back though, because those are the things that you could do that are common. I mean, there's so many different things. And I love how Mark said it earlier. It's like we're just trying to look at the things you can do, but everything else is open game. Mark's bought cows with his hsa, you know, go Yellowstone. It's a little more boring. And I buy rentals.

I've got a crypto. Mine.

Yeah, I own crypto. Just. I just buy the crypto. But. But let's talk about. I want to go back to like, why to self direct. And we had a guest on our directed Ira webinar that was, I thought was really insightful on this. And I don't even. He wasn't even talking about self directing. He was talking about he went from Wall Street. So this is directed IR webinar. I recommend checking it out. It's a directed ira.com site. But I had Jamison Manwaring, he was a equity analyst at Goldman Sachs. The guy's working on Wall Street. His job was to go through stocks and he specialized in the tech industry and say buy, sell, hold.

That was his job.

And he would go rate stocks and they would come out and they say, buy Apple, sell Microsoft, you know, hold Adobe, whatever.

Whatever that week was.

Yeah. And so they were out making recommendations all the time. And one of the things that was really insightful was the pricing on Wall Street. See, when you're investing in Wall street, you're competing with a bunch of Wall street jerks that are all over this every day that probably have a competitive advantage against you, the average investor. And so if there was differentiation in price or a deal to be found that was already priced in, everyone thought Apple was going to go up in value because they had the next iPhone coming out.

And.

And so that was already priced in. You couldn't Buy it at a deal. A million other people already knew that, and so they already went and bought it expecting this. So he ended up taking his money he was making from Wall street and buying real estate. And now he owns a ton of apartment buildings, he syndicates, he does deals in real estate. But he went from seeing what Wall street was, how everything was essentially priced in, because everyone had all this information and all the Wall street experts had more than you could probably get. And you had no ability to compete to find deals. In real estate. Just like in small business and private funds and startups and all these things, crypto, you have an ability to compete, to find deals. Because of course, how do you make money? Buy low, sell high. We got to find the deals. I got to find the opportunity that I think later could be worth more. And that's where you can do it. In real estate, there's, you know, how many cities are in, in the US that's how many real estate markets there are. All right. It is hard for even Wall street to go off after that and compete.

Hedge funds are the only ones that have found any competitive advantage in the real estate realm because they put teams on it to try to go spend their fund. On this note too, I want to throw out this, this important point, a difference. At the very beginning, I talked about the difference of 5% and 7%. Well, let's circle back to that. Let's say I can take my Roth IRA and get 12% or 15% versus seven or five people in just a short amount of time, five, 10, 15 years. That difference in your rate of return could be six figures. It could be seven figures. We've got clients with $20 million Roth IRAs. And you hear about it more and more, these mega Roth IRAs. And how do people get there? They're investing in startups and small business and real estate. They're doing wholesaling, they're doing flips, they're doing rehabs, they're doing commercial, they're doing developments. We've got clients doing real estate developments in their 401ks and multimillion dollar 401ks. And you go, well, only the rich can do that. No, you can do that too.

Yeah. 10 years ago, 20 years ago, these people were not. Yeah, their accounts were at zero. That's the other thing is everybody sees these people have million dollar accounts. Like, well, you know, they obviously. No, they all started at 02.

Yeah.

But they got, you know what? Everyone did the same thing that we just talked about. They saved. They got to an easy place to park their money and invested it. And they found better ways to strategically invest and self direct it is the

same path it is. Now. I'm going to reveal the final step here, number five. And I think this. And then we're going to give you some practical basic steps. One of them is how to get some easy information on learning the steps to self direct. It's really not that complex. It's just getting the knowledge to do it. Step five in this whole process, once you're strategically investing, is now being strategic in a tax manner. This is understanding the difference between a Roth and a traditional understanding the hsa, which you can take immediate distributions from and not have to wait till you're 59 and a half using a Coverdale where you can pull out returns tax free and penalty free for education for your kids and rolling that account to the grandkids, and then the great grandkids and creating these accounts in perpetuity and continuing to invest them. And what we love to talk about is Roth chunking, taking Roth money and saying, ooh, I can get this money tax free. At some point maybe I need to take these IRAs or old 401ks from work and start converting them. Converting them into Roth strategically. And so that's where a lot of our more advanced listeners are like, okay, I get self directing. What next? Well, how much of your self directed money is in a Roth? Oh, well, not all of it. Well, let's work on that.

Yeah, and if you're like missing a lot of this stuff, you're like, guys, you are like information overload. I don't know the difference between a Roth and hsa. We have a podcast episode. I don't know what Roth conversion and Chunky is. We have an entire podcast episode. I don't even know what the hell a Roth IR is. We have a podcast episode on that. Okay, like we have all the content you can go consume and teach us. And it's free. It's just out there. We're just trying to educate you so you know what you can do. Now remember, when we're talking about self directing, one of the key things is we're talking about investing in what you know. Okay? So learn, become an expert. And if you don't know what to invest in, then still save, still park your money to get some return, whether it's on Wall street in an efficient, low risk fee, you know, you know, conservative way. Then be ready to self direct. When you see those opportunities, start getting educated where you can find the details the deals and you can make more than what Wall Street's going to pay you because you can beat Wall Street. It's actually not that hard. I mean, the billion that we have here and 10,000 accounts that we have over here at Directed IRA, that's what people are doing. You know, now some win and some lose, but that's what they're doing. They're working it, they're finding the deals, they're taking control of their retirement. And that's what really self directing is all about.

All right, now we promised this for our podcast listeners. A lot of this podcast is cut down into smaller chunks for YouTube. But you are faithful podcast listener. We love you. Thank you for, for hanging with us. Please share this podcast with your friends or family. We want to be on the cutting edge of unique strategies that you feel like you're, you know, there's no sales pitch at the end of the day. So last topic because we promise promised us earlier is how do you kind of find that advisor and how do you manage your advisor in this step three, when you're just kind of default investing? I'm just kind of doing the basics. I need to keep my fees down. What do I, what do I look for? And so this is the difference between and I have a whole chapter in my book, the financial freedom, chapter three, the truth about your financial advisor. So I recommend you check that out and get it on Kindle, Audible and the print version. And it's just a simple chapter, four or five pages. But Matt, why don't you, you know this better than me. Advisor is kind of an overall term. What's a fiduciary mean? And what should people be looking for? What basic advice would you give?

So basically you kind of have like broker dealers out there, you know, that are, this is the typical stockbroker. You know, you're at Edward Jones, you know, or you're at Merrill lynch, you know, I mean, that's the typical stockbroker, so to speak. And they have an advantage, they have some responsibility to their employer and they can't do some things like sell away. So like if you were talking to your stockbroker and you're like, hey, I want to go buy a rental property with my ira. They're going to be like, oh, you can't do that. And that's because their Merrill lynch advisors, they can't do that for you. That's called selling away because you're going to move your money to something we don't make money on. And you know, big Merrill lynch isn't going to like that.

Yeah, you're going to get. That advisor would get fired.

Right.

For recommending something that might be better for you.

It's insane.

So their standard, the average advisor at these broker dealers is what's called suitability. Is this investment suitable for you? And then they're going to try and talk you into staying in their family of investments and options and oh, you don't want to go there and you can't do this. And you. And it's not that you can't, it's that they can't. And they're very sneaky and a lot of smoke and mirrors.

Let me give a couple examples. If you're at this spot, you need to move. Let's say you're at Northwestern Mutual and you have a financial advisor or you're at New York Life and you have a financial advisor. Guys, you have a life insurance salesman. You don't have a financial advisor. How much life insurance and annuity products do you have in your portfolio right now? Like seriously, they will sell what they have.

Yeah.

So the RIA and the investment advisor, Representative Mark mentioned earlier, that is really the true fiduciary out there where it's their job and their license is to be a fiduciary for you and to make investments and decisions that are in your best interests and they're not theirs.

Yeah, they're not going to be at a life insurance company, a bank or a broker dealer. They. These are more of your independent financial advisory firms that you see on the corner in a decent sized city. You're going to see them doing their thing. They're kind of under the radar. They don't have the budget to have a commercial during the super bowl. But they're making kinds of money and they're independent and they're going to. And when you walk in you can say, are you fiduciaries? Are you married to a broker dealer? And they can say, nope, we're a fiduciary. And that's what you want to look for and say, okay, I want a financial plan. And some of you out there that have some larger portfolios are like, hey guys, I'm going to have something in Wall street and I want to find a good advisor and that's fine.

You should. We're okay with that. We're not saying like go all in on self directing. I'm just saying Wall Street's just told you, leave it all to us 100%. We got you because we want all your money because we make more money.

Yeah, no, and we would love. I've got money on Wall Street, Matt has money on Wall street. But do we have all of our money there?

No.

And so you need to have a well diversified plan, not just in your broker, dealer account diversification under their definition of diversification. So finding the right advisor to do that, default investing, keeping your fees to a minimum. And you don't have to have a financial advisor everybody. You can go to the TD Ameritrades and buy the ETFs and the mutual funds that are no load and again, just kind of park money for a while. If you have got more money involved, you might have an advisor.

Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, if you're like guys, I'm just getting started, I don't even have 100 grand to. You don't have a financial advisor yet? I'm sorry, you don't need one. You got to learn how to save. Okay. You got to get some chips to start playing at the table. And frankly a financial advisor, you can't afford it yet. And, but you can get there. There's so much you need to do to learn about saving and investing before a financial advisor can be helpful to you. Really.

And some people say, well, how much do I need to self direct? $1,000. I mean you could, there are self directed investments where you may say, well, I want to go buy into this syndication, a cardone fund that's built to allow for smaller investors and there may be a GoFundMe type thing or you might want to crypto.

I mean crypto was the easy one, you know, because it's like, oh, I'll just throw two grand at it or covered up for my kid or I'll just drop my 6000 in my backdoor Roth IRA this year and just drop it all into crypto. I mean those were easy for me even. I bought my first self directed investment which is rental property. It took me 40 grand. Okay. Now that was in my 401k. Actually it took me about two, about three years of contributions before I could buy it. And that was just maxing out the employee contribution with a small, small match. This is, this is, you know, years ago when the contribution rules were a little lower what you could put in. So. But so sometimes it might take you a while to get enough to do a self directed investment, depending on what you want to do.

Yeah. I partnered with the rancher up in Idaho this last year and bought five cows that were pregnant. We can go into the birds and the bees if you. They were impregnated cows that had bull, that had baby. There was a bowl involved. And they had baby cows called calves. And then they were bulls until they became steers. That's what's a heifer. A heifer is a female cow and a bull would be a male cow. And then early on they are castrated, if I can say that word. And then they become steers. So you have steers and heifers. Steers and heifers. Unless you keep one around as a bull, who's the lucky guy, you know, just gets to meander around and in the, in the field. Okay, okay, we'll leave it at that. So anyway, I, but I took my, the point being I took my ira.

Invest in what? You know.

Yeah.

You know, cows.

Not really, but. But I knew a rancher, the new cows and he was like, you like Yellowstone? I'm. Yeah, I'm. I'm on a form.

I mean you sound like you did. You just gave me, you know, a little one on one on.

It took a lot of work to learn that. But no, I was in the Dutton family. So I formed a Kohler Dutton livestock company owned by my Ira and I went and bought just a few cows that were in the herd. That's another term you got to get to know. Yeah. How big your herd.

Pasture.

Yeah. That were out to pasture. You know, when you walk around Idaho, you don't go, you know, how's your 401k doing? You go, how's your herd doing? Yeah.

See and I'm serious, that is building a future, a financial future too off Wall street, small business. All this stuff that we talk about, rental properties outside of your retirement account, that is building a retirement, not reliant on Wall Street. And so all the stuff that we talk about on this podcast, Main Street Business on directed ira, it's really talking about you being in control, not relying on Wall street, small business, entrepreneurship, rental, real estate, building, wealth, investing in the stuff that you know, that's where you can have financial success and that's where you're in charge. And I know sometimes that can be a little overwhelming. And that's why Wall street, what's Wall street wants? They want you to think, ah, it's too hard. Don't go start that new business. Don't go buy that rental property. It's complicated. Don't go self direct jobs.

You're gonna lose everything.

That's tricky, you know, so. But they love that because they like just push some buttons online. It's easy. We'll handle all your money.

We'll take care of it. And there's commercial after commercial. If you watch, you know, the woman coming at home and sees her financial statement, just tosses it on the counter and throws her keys down. And here at, you know, XYZ, broker, dealer, we've been managing money for 900 years. We'll take care of your money for you. You can just go enjoy life. And then the next scene, she's out jogging or out by the pool with the kids and oh, yes, my retirement taken care of. I'm just gonna let Wall street do it. Yeah, they just want to. Yeah.

Just, you know, you know what, the ones I love are the financial advisor where they're like talking to the couple that's kind of like in their 50s, you know, and they're like, and they're like, well, you've been such a big part of our family's lives and our, you know, daughter's graduating from college now and we wouldn't have been, wouldn't have happened without you and want to invite you to the college graduate. That doesn't happen. Tell me what financial advisor got invited to kids graduation.

Come on. I know, it's ridiculous. So. Well, I loved Matt's summary there a moment ago. You can control your retirement. Life's okay. Be careful, be very cautious with what you invest in. But know what you're investing in. Invest in what you know. That's kind of two different points really. If you tear that, you know, take that, peel away the onion. But folks, thanks for being here. Keep studying, keep learning, live the dream, don't give up. We're not going anywhere. We'll be here next week and we'd love to keep being a part of your lives. We'd like to go to your child's graduation. I think we could do it. Yeah.

I mean you could invite your favorite podcast hosts or attorneys, self directed IRA company, whatever it be. And the last thing I was just going to say is if you want to learn more, Mark and I will both be there at The Self Directed IRA Summit. Sdirasummit.com October 20th, 21st. It's in Scottsdale, Arizona. Charity Golf Tournament the day after on Saturday. So come. It's a day and a half of content learning how to self direct your

retirement October 20th and 21st in Phoenix, Arizona. Who doesn't like Phoenix in October?

Yeah. Sdirasummit.com and if you want to just

attend virtually, you can. And we'll have a virtual host and it'll be recorded. So if you miss parts of it, you can watch it later and you're going to love it.

Thanks, everyone.

Thanks. See you next week.