Matt Paulson pays himself a salary for household expenses plus quarterly profit distributions timed to tax dates. Half his MarketBeat equity sits in an irrevocable trust, with each distribution split: 50% to the trust, 30% to taxes, 20% to lifestyle. His personal wealth spans stocks, real estate in Sioux Falls, 10-15% cash, and 10% private equity.
Yeah. How do you— I guess this one's still kind of business, but how do you approach paying yourself and building personal net worth?
Yeah, so with MarketBeat, we do distributions every quarter. Like, I pay myself a good salary that covers like my wife and I's lifestyle expenses, and like that covers your credit card bills and all that stuff. On top of that, we do quarterly distributions, and we do it at the same time taxes are due. So that's like January 15th, April 15th, June 15th, September 15th. So whenever it's tax time, we leave about 3 months of operating expenses in the company because we're very profitable, revenue is consistent, there's no need for us to keep a lot more money than that in the company. So anything above that number we'll distribute. Right now half of MarketBeat is owned by my irrevocable trust. That's like an estate planning thing to— Keep money away from the government when you die. So you do a dollar distribution. 50 cents is owned by the trust. So that goes straight to my wealth manager, a guy named Jesse Haller. He'll invest it for me. Then of the other half, about 30 cents on the dollar goes to the government. So really only 20 cents I've got to live on, which is more than enough. And that's kind of how things are set up. So my wealth is kind of split between the stock market and real estate. I own a bunch of real estate here in Sioux Falls. It's been a pretty good investment for us. I want to do more of that over time. But it's just, for me, it's— I try to keep maybe 10-15% in cash, and then maybe I've got maybe 10% in private equity for things like Homegrown Capital, and the rest is kind of split between the market and real estate. I don't mess with crypto anymore. Like, that's too much time for, for me to invest in something, but certainly have in the past.
