Mark Moss lost millions in 2008 when he was forced to sell real estate at market bottom. He rebuilt to nearly $1 million a year but stayed all-cash, terrified of debt. He learned wealthy people use assets as collateral and leverage, not hoard cash, to actually build wealth.
There's some lessons in life that can't be taught. They can only be learned. And unfortunately, I had to learn this one the hard way. And I had built up a lot of wealth. I had built up two different tech companies, two big exits, a huge real estate empire. 2008 came, the great financial crash, and wiped me out. Millions gone overnight. Now, the problem that really led to this is that I had assets, a lot of assets, but I had no system. So what happened is when the market crashed, I was a forced seller. One of the number one rules, Warren Buffett says the number one rule with investing is to never lose money. I say the number one rule to investing, which I guess sort of coincides with his, is never be a forced seller. And I was a forced seller. I was forced to liquidate my real estate portfolio at the very bottom of the market. Liquidation death. If I could have held the real estate, today it's worth way more. I'd be really rich if I had it, but I don't. I forced to liquidate down there. Now, after that, I still had my mental capacity. I still have my skills. I still had my relationships. So I started making money again. And I started making money pretty quickly. Within a couple of years, I was back up to making almost $1 million a year. But I was, I had PTSD. I was so afraid of what had happened to me. I vowed to my wife, I vowed to my family, this would never happen to us again. And so I was terrified of credit. I didn't want to use any credit because what happened last time is I used credit and then I couldn't afford to pay it. And then I lost everything. And so this time I'm just going to stay away. And I was making good money. So I paid cash for everything. I paid cash for my cars. I paid cash for my houses. All my business expenses, everything was cash. But I realized after years and years, 6, 7 years, I realized that even though I was making a high income, my lifestyle got back on track. We had the big house, we had the nice cars again, we were living a nice lifestyle, but I wasn't building any wealth, barely any wealth. Like, yeah, my income was giving me a good life, but my wealth, my assets, they were growing, but they were growing very slowly. So, I wasted about 7 years of my life making great money but building, you know, almost zero wealth. Why? Because I was still thinking like a worker, right? I was working hard. I was making a lot of high income. That was great. I was hoarding cash. I was afraid of leverage. And I managed my life, my expenses like a P&L. Now, by 2015, I'd been going to all types of masterminds trying to learn from, trying to get access to as many of these wealthy people as I could to learn what they were doing. I knew there was another system out there. And I learned what the wealthy do. And I learned I had to stop thinking like a worker. I had to start thinking like a treasurer. And it's that one shift that changed everything. Now real quick, raise your hand in, well, maybe we can't raise your hand in Zoom. We're not in Zoom, we're in WebinarJam. Just give me a thumbs up. How about a thumbs up if you've ever sold an asset to pay for something? Ever sold an asset to pay for something? Maybe it was stocks, Bitcoin, real estate, whatever. Have you ever sold an asset to buy a car? Sell an asset to pay a medical expense? Sold an asset to go on vacation? Okay, so I got lots of thumbs, lots of thumbs up, lots of thumbs up. And if you don't have a thumbs up, then you probably never had an asset before. Because that's what we do, right? We buy an asset low and we sell it high, right? Buy low, sell high. And then we sell high, we take some of the money and we buy stuff, right? The few people that don't have their thumbs up, again, probably didn't ever buy anything. Almost everyone, as you can see, but that's worker behavior. But it's not your fault. It's not your fault. You were never taught the treasure way. But you're about to learn it right now. Okay? So, you won't have any excuse after this. Now, here's the switch. As of today, here's what we want to start doing. We want to stop trying to build wealth with income. We want to stop playing the, if I earn more, if I save more, I hope that it works out and I can retire in 40 years. I hope that I die before my wealth goes to zero, but that's a profit and loss strategy. It's a P&L strategy. And you just saw that it's costing you maybe $1,100 a day. So what we want to do is we want to start building wealth with assets instead. So we have collateral. The collateral provides us with liquidity. And the liquidity is what pays for our lifestyle. That's a balance sheet strategy. Mm-hmm.
