Use Credit Like This, And The Government Will Make You Wealthy

For 7 years, I made over $1 million a year, but at the end of those 7 years, I had built almost zero real wealth. Now, I know that sentence doesn't make sense to some people, right? $1 million a year for 7 years, that's $7 million. But where did it all go? Well, taxes, a bigger life, a nicer house, a nicer car, going to nicer restaurants, maybe more expensive travel, and all the income's gone. I mean, sure, we had some minimal investments, but I didn't figure out how to really build wealth on my own. It took a guy worth over $50 million at a mastermind dinner that I was at that looked me right in the eye. And he said one sentence that I'm going to share with you right now. And that sentence is what changed everything. All right. This is going to be the full story. Now, before we get into the sentence that changed everything and the strategy and how we went to building real wealth, we got to break down some common misbeliefs. You see, because most people think that the key is more income. We've learned our whole life that the key is to, you know, go to school, get good grades, get a good job, climb that corporate ladder, make more money, start a business, a side hustle, whatever. And make more money. But making money, making income, high income, it's not the answer. And a lot of times it's a trap. It's not wealth. You see, income is what you earn, but wealth has to be engineered. And what happens is as we make more income, like I told you about my own experience, I paid more in taxes, more of my income left. My lifestyle went up, of course, like I want to live, right? So I got the bigger house, I got the bigger car, all of those things. And sure, you know, I'll put the 5 or 10% aside into some, you know, stocks or whatever it is, but that's not real wealth. I'm getting more income, but I wasn't building wealth. The difference of income is wealth is that, of course, if I stop working, the income goes away. If I have wealth, wealth can compound forever. And before I get into the mechanics of it, just think about this quickly. The cost of living is going up approximately 8 to 10% a year, give or take. Cost of home prices going up and gasoline prices, everything going about 8 to 10% a year. The average person's income— wages— goes up by about 3% a year. That means that you can't grow your income fast enough to keep up with the rate of cost of living going up. But I can get my assets to go up by 20%. So if I have wealth, real assets, they can compound maybe twice as much as the cost of living. That's the big difference. All right. So let me tell you a little bit about my own story so you can understand exactly how I discovered this on my own. And so, you know, after 2008, if you've been watching me for any time, you already know the story, but I built up a lot of wealth, two different companies that I built and sold, some high-value exits. I sold my high-tech medical equipment company to the largest medical company in the world, Henry Schein. Had big exits, put all my money into real estate, Southern California. 2008 came and I got crushed. It's a sob story, but don't cry for me too long because I was able to start making money again. I was able to get my income back again because I still had my skills. I still had my relationships. And so I got back to making high income. But here's the problem. While I was making high income, I was afraid. I was scared. I had PTSD of what just happened to me in 2008. All my real estate, I had loans against it. I didn't have any income because I had sold my businesses. The market crashed. My loans got called due. I didn't have enough money. And I got into a bad situation. So my knee-jerk reaction was don't use credit. Don't ever go into debt ever again. And so I'm making high income, so I'll just pay for everything. I don't need credit. I'll pay cash for my cars. No problem. I'll pay cash for whatever I need. But here's the problem. We live in a debt-based monetary system. You see, the old rules that maybe your parents or your grandparents grew up under, those are no longer here. Before 1971, we were in an equity-based, a gold-based system. And so savings made sense. Today, in a debt-based monetary system, that means money is actually created through debt issuance. That means if I want to get money, like have a money tree, I need to use debt. And so the problem is, sure, I'm making high income and sure, I'm living a great life. And sure, I'm putting 5% a year, 10% a year in some S&P 500. You know, dividend ETF, whatever, but that's growing at 6%, 7%, 8%. It's growing at less than the cost of living going up. And I wasn't building wealth. So for example, I wasn't buying real estate. I didn't own any rental properties. I didn't own any apartment buildings because in order to buy those apartment buildings, that would've required debt, which I was afraid to do. And so while my income went up and sure, my savings was growing incrementally after making millions of dollars, when I look back at the actual assets that I own, the assets that were compounding, the assets that continue to compound whether I worked or not was minimal. Now, unfortunately for me, it took years for me to realize this. Like, I'm making a lot of money, but I can't get off this treadmill. Like, as a matter of fact, I'm actually digging myself deeper because now my lifestyle has gotten so big that if my income drops, then what? I don't have the assets. Now, you know, in my perspective, the way that's sort of been one of the secrets to my career is I believe that success leaves clues. So what that means is that if I can find someone else who's had success, success that I want, and I can reverse engineer or find the clues that they've left behind, and I can do I should achieve about the same or similar results. So the obvious answer for myself was, well, I need to go find people who have achieved this result that I want. I didn't have any of those people in my direct life, so I had to go find them. So where are they? Well, I started attending masterminds. So, you know, you pay money, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a year to join high net worth, high income people. And you can mastermind, you can network together. I was joining many of these trying to, trying to figure this out. And I was at dinner one night and a guy reached over and he kind of looked at me and, you know, he had heard me talking, you know, everyone gets like a hot seat at the event and he heard me talking and he said that— You don't have to you have a money problem, you have a system problem. He said, like, you're obviously really good at making income. You made it, you've lost it, you made it again, but you don't have a system. And that's why you're not building wealth. And when he said that, then it was like, well, what is the system? And how do I build it? And that sent me onto a whole nother trail. If you want to know more about creating a wealth operating system, just comment ready, and we'll send you the link. So then we have to answer those two questions. So what is a wealth system? And then more importantly, how do I do it? You see, a wealth system is something where I have a system. It's systematized. Something that can run on repeat, something that can run automatically, something where my wealth continues to compound over and over and over like a flywheel, each cycle getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And we do that by using assets. And we use assets in a way that I can use those assets as collateral. And those collateral assets now create liquidity that allows me to get more assets. And it creates this compounding loop and it catches every dollar of income the way through because then I also use those assets, not just collateral, but as a way that I can offset my income, or more specifically, my income taxes. I learned that the wealthy don't really pay taxes. It's why you hear Robert Kiyosaki talk about it. It's why Donald Trump had his tax returns leaked and he wasn't paying any income taxes. Sure, there's plenty of other taxes, but income taxes. And we can do that with assets. The government can literally pay us to invest and we use those assets to build that wealth system. And so that's what that looks like. We had to understand what that system looks like and then how we can build that out for ourselves. So So I know that sounds a little vague. Let me try and put this a little bit more specific for you. So the first thing you have to understand is that there's no best asset for you to buy. There's no like the best investment that you should get. We want to look at every single asset that we buy like a tool in a toolbox, right? I need to know the very specific role or problem I'm trying to solve, and I need to get the very specific tool for that. And we want to look at our assets similar to that. So I do something, an exercise I call the balance sheet X-ray. And the balance sheet X-ray lets me look at all the assets on my balance sheet, and then I put them into categories. So I can understand how I can use them like tools in a toolbox. So for example, I would understand what type of asset is this? Is it a productive asset? Meaning does it produce some sort of income for me? Is it a collateral asset? Is it an asset that I can use collateral for more liquidity? Is it a lifestyle asset? That's an asset that would be on my balance sheet, like maybe a boat or an RV, but it's neither productive nor is it collateral asset. And then we have what I would call deadweight assets. Now, this doesn't mean they're worthless. It just means that I can't really do anything with them. This might be land in Bali. This might be a venture capital investment. So it could be worth a lot of money, but I can't really use it in that purpose. The next thing I want to know with those assets is, are they high value and high control? Low value, high control? And it's a matrix. I want assets that are both high value and high control that I can use. And so you have to understand that once I understand my assets in this way, like tools, then I can use them specifically. Let me give you a more specific analogy that maybe helps. Helps you. If you came into my mechanic shop and I have all the tools and you want to fix your car and you said, hey, Mark, give me, give me the best tool to use. But I would say, what are you trying to do? You're like, well, I'm— I, I need to, I need to remove a screw. I need a screwdriver. And I'd say, okay, but is it like a Phillips head screwdriver or a flathead screwdriver? And you'd be, well, it's a Phillips screwdriver. Okay, well, is it a small Phillips screw or is it a big Phillips screw? Right. And so I need to know the details. And that's how we have to understand our assets. So that's the first step. Then what I want to understand is that some assets can be multipurpose assets. So if I use the right type of assets, as I said earlier, the government literally can pay us to invest, meaning I could take money I would otherwise give to the government as part of income taxes and I could buy assets instead. So the first step that I'd want to do in building out this wealth system is to start with how much income taxes am I paying and how can I redirect that money into assets to get my flywheel going. Now, typically a lot of people starting this wealth engine, this flywheel, don't have the income to buy those assets. So in this step, I would want to use credit that's available to me through my home, through a business credit line, through credit cards, collateral assets, whatever I have to get assets that give me tax depreciation that allow me to get this flywheel going. That'd be the first step. But the way that you build your flywheel is going to be very specific. to you, depending on what your outcome is that you're trying to achieve, the starting point that you're starting at, and the timeframe in which you're trying to achieve that. And that's just one example of how you can start building out your own specific system. But it starts with the same thing that started with me, which is asking the question, what is the system I need to build? And more specifically, how do I do it? Now, for me, I had to go find the right people to ask that question to. So the question then becomes, well, who do I ask that question to? Because the real shift for me wasn't earning more money. It was getting around the right people who could show me how to build this capital allocation machine, a system that automatically converted my active income into liquidity, into appreciating assets, and using tax efficiency for long-term cash flow. And if you want to learn more about that without having to go to a mastermind dinner like I did, then you might want to go watch this video right here. I'm going to walk you through the exact wealth operating system I built after 2008, and I'm going to show you how every layer works together to compound over time. Now, if you want to understand the structure behind durable wealth, just go ahead and click on this video and I'll see you over there.