In this solo presentation, Mark Moss outlines three essential numbers that determine whether a person truly has a functional wealth system or is merely guessing about their financial health. The first metric is the liquidity ratio – the portion of net worth that can be accessed quickly without selling assets, encompassing cash, credit, collateral, and other liquid resources. Moss explains why liquidity, not just asset size, drives cash flow, portfolio resilience, and wealth‑building speed. The second metric is real yield, defined as the nominal return on assets minus the true rate of inflation, which Moss argues is better measured by the growth rate of the money supply rather than the official CPI (which he calls “CP Lie”). He illustrates how recent monetary expansion has driven roughly 10 % annual price increases in homes, gasoline, and other personal expenses, meaning investors must earn more than that to grow wealth. The third metric is the asset‑to‑income ratio, which gauges how effectively one can convert assets into cash flow to live off them without liquidating. Moss discusses how this ratio matters differently at various life stages – for younger earners the focus is on compounding, while retirees need sufficient asset‑derived income. He advises prioritizing improvement of real yield, warning against chasing high‑risk “pump‑and‑dump” strategies, and instead recommends “vertical” investing – engineering higher returns through structured, lower‑risk approaches (linked to a separate video). The talk concludes with a call to action to assess one’s own numbers, consider professional guidance, and explore the linked vertical‑investing content.
Chapters
There are 3 numbers that tell you whether you actually have a wealth system or you're just guessing at your wealth. Now, most people have never calculated even one of them, and I want to give you all 3 right now so you can check your own situation as we go. So let's get into it. Okay, so the first number we want to understand is how much liquidity do I have available to me? If you watch my main channel and you hear me talk about macroeconomics, you hear me talk about the global liquidity, and that's just How much money is there available? And it's not how much money is there, it's how much ability do we have to get money. We have to understand liquidity is not money. Now, cash is liquidity, but liquidity is not cash. Liquidity covers lots of things. It's our— my ability to get cash. So it's my credit, it's my collateral, it's my assets, all those things. So number one, what is liquidity? A lot of you watching this might be very asset rich on paper, but liquidity poor. Cash pool. You have assets, your home's worth $2 million, but you don't have enough money to live off of. And so the first thing we want to know is what our liquidity ratio is. How much of my net worth could I access in a short window if I needed to without having to sell anything? And we want to understand that having the ability to access that liquidity determines the quality of our life. It determines how much cash flow I have to live. It determines how strong my portfolio, my fortress portfolio is, how well I can defend and protect my assets. It also determines how fast I can build my wealth. So the first thing you have to understand is that having assets on paper is nice, but the real goal is to understand how much liquidity I have in those assets. Okay. Now the second number that I want to understand is I want to understand what is the real yield I'm earning against my assets. And the reason why it's important to understand this is because I want to be able to access liquidity. I want to be able to get money from my assets without having to sell sell down my assets. And so I need to understand what the yield is on those assets, but I also need to understand what my real yield is. What am I calling real yield? You see, most people think about their real yield is their total yield. They think that if I am, you know, making, let's say, 6% on a piece of real estate that I own, then I'm making 6%. But we want to understand real yield is the difference between what I'm earning and what I'm losing to inflation every month. Now, the problem is that inflation's a little bit tricky. The government-reported goal is to get to 2%. Of course, we've been much higher. We've been at 3% or even higher than that. And under the Biden administration, we're up to 9%. But the problem is that that's not real. That's what we call CPI, or I like to call it CP Lie. The real number you want to track is something different. And the number that I like to track is actually the rate of monetary expansion, meaning how fast is the money supply growing? Why is that? Well, the reason why is because CPI is supposedly tracking a basket of goods, and it's not really doing that. But I don't really care about that basket of goods. I care about my own life. I care about how much are the price of homes going up? How much is the price of gasoline going up? How much is the price of steak going up? Because that's what I want to eat every day. And the problem is that the CPI continues to manipulate and adjust the basket. And if you wanna know what the real number is, again, it's the rate of monetary debasement, and I'm gonna tell you why. But first of all, just check yourself over the last 5 years, or say, let's say since 2020 COVID. How much have homes gone up? How much has gasoline gone up? How much has your insurance gone up? Think about that. About 10% a year. Why 10% a year? Well, how much has the money supply expanded since then? Oh, about 10% a year. One of the greatest economists of all time, Mario Rothbard, he said that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. So when we increase the money supply, it causes the price of other things to go up in different amounts. So if the real rate of inflation is 10%, then what's my real yield? I need to be making more than that in order to make money. Otherwise I'm just, you know, not losing as much or I'm standing still. So the second number is what your real yield is. Okay. And the third number we want to look at is what is our asset-to-income ratio? So a lot of people, as I said earlier, are asset rich, but cash flow poor. We want to understand how well are we able to turn our assets into income? And what does good or bad look like? Well, good or bad is, is a relative term. Good, I define as things that get me closer to my goal. Bad takes me further away. So depending on where you're at, like for me right now, my stage of life, I'm not really concerned with cash flow from my assets. Instead, I'd rather my assets compound. Why? Well, because I still have income coming in. I'm still working. I still have my businesses. I have income coming in. So I don't need to extract the cash flow from my assets today. I'd rather reinvest that and allow my assets to compound. But if I'm retiring, the goal for everybody is to get to a point where they could live off of their assets. And then I need to learn how to extract the income from my assets without selling them. And so understanding that ratio, understand the, the, the ability or when I will be able to get to a point where I can live off my assets instead. For me, I have a goal. My daughter's in high school. I figure in the next couple years after she's graduated, maybe my wife and I might slow things down a little bit. Maybe we'll start traveling around the world. I might bring my income down a little bit from where it is today, and I might want to start getting income from my assets. Well, how much income do I need? How much assets do I have? What's the real yield I'm earning? We talked about number 2, and then that gives me my asset-to-income ratio that I need. So if you want to live off your assets at one point, you need to know that number, the asset-to-income ratio. All right. So now you have the 3 numbers you should be looking at. And, uh, let's say that you don't like one or more of those numbers. What's the first one you should be focusing on? The first one that you should probably focus on is the yield. What is my real yield? Because that's the one that's gonna affect everything else. I can't really extract income off my assets. I don't have a positive real yield. So we'll start with there. What should I do to get the yield up? Now, for most of us, we think that if I need a higher yield, I have to take on more risk. So shoot, you know, my 60/40 portfolio is getting me about 6.5% per year. My Ray Dalio all-weather portfolio is getting me 7% a year. I need 10% at least. So how do I get from 7% to 10%? Well, I guess I got to start taking a lot of risk. Let me, you know, stay on Reddit and YouTube and Instagram all day trying to figure out some hot stock tips. Maybe I can catch some pump and dumps. Maybe I can get into some, you know, meme stocks or some crypto trading or some options trading, something I can do, take on more risk to get a higher return. If I could just get lucky with that one stock tip, I know I could get, you know, maybe I get a 50% return on that. Maybe I can get a 2x, a 3x, a 4x on that stock tip. Okay, let's say that you can, but how much are you going to put into that? It's obviously very risky. So you're going to put 5% of your portfolio, 10%, and you're going to risk 10% of your portfolio on that. And even if you did, What's it going to bring you from 7% to 9%? So rather than chasing risk, rather than spending all your time trying to chase risk and trying to stay in these pump and dump groups or whatever you're trying to do, instead we can get that return by engineering the return instead. Instead of investing horizontally like most people would do and then trying to get a little risk to average your returns higher, we engineer a return by investing vertically instead. Now, I know that investing vertically sounds foreign, like, what the heck am I even talking about? And I'm not trying to leave you hanging here, but that's a whole separate video that we have linked on the channel. But if you want to know what it would take, first of all, what is the active yield that you need to achieve your goal and how could you get that active yield higher? Then maybe it's something you want to book a call and we can walk you through that with your own real actual numbers. If you do, we'll put a link down in the description down below. Otherwise, you might want to watch this video right here that's going to walk you through the whole sequence, and I'll see you over there.
