Wealth Strategy Secrets Of The Ultra-Wealthy

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and I'm really excited for today's guest. It's not often that we get a board certified surgeon. I'm actually kind of intimidated. Scott. But before we talk to our guest, I'd be remiss if I didn't properly introduce you. You know him, you know him, you love him. Six Sigma, the mini Batman himself. Scott Todd from scotttodd.net landmodo.com and most importantly, if not automating your Craigslist and your Facebook postings, posting domination.com TheLandgeek Scott Todd, how are you? Mark I'm great.

How are you?

I'm great, I'm great. I'm really excited for this podcast for a number of reasons. Are you ready for this?

I mean, yeah. Like, what can we say? Here's a guy that has it figured.

Out and.

He has seen things in the body that we can't even imagine.

Yeah. You know, it's so funny because I talk so much about solo economic dependency and oftentimes, you know, even the high income earning surgeons and doctors and lawyers, they have sole economic dependency because if they're not working or they're not billing, they're not making any money. And our guest somehow realized this and was able to avoid solo economic dependencies. So let's talk to Buck Joffrey, Dr. Buck Joffre, he's a podcaster, a best selling financial author, a real estate investor, and a board certified surgeon. Buck Joffrey, how are you?

I'm good, man, how are you?

Pulse is normal, respiration is fine. So Buck, it's not often we get a board certified surgeon that is a sort of a real asset expert and a financial author. So kind of walk us through how you made this sort of transition and why you even thought about it.

Yeah, it's sort of a. Yeah, it's a long story. But in a nutshell, basically I started out like a lot of doctors and I was a good student. Right. I was an A student and I went to college and got as and went to med school and did well and actually started out as a neurosurgery resident. So I was doing brain surgery and made some switches there, but ended up ultimately, believe it or not, as a cosmetic surgeon. And it was interesting because as soon as I finished my training, the day after I went on, I got married the day after my training and my wife and I went on our honeymoon to Mexico and on the way back, I was trying to find a book to read in this dingy bookstore in Puerto Vallarta. And it was either this book with, like, this guy with long Florida flowing hair and no shirt on, or it was Robert Kiyosaki's Cash Flow Quadrant. And I never heard of Robert Kiyosaki. And I didn't really know anything about money. Understand? I was, like, a really academic guy. I was, like, writing papers and chapters and books and things like that. And I picked up this book, read it on the plane, and it came off, and I was completely transformed. I was like, what the. I mean, I hadn't even occurred to me that there was a world outside of being professional. The idea that I could, you know, control my own financial destiny, all these things are just mind blowing to me. And so that's where it all started, Mark. And from there, instead of going into working for somebody, I said, well, gosh, well, what could I do? And let me just start my own practice, and let's make sure that I can phase myself out of that practice. And so I did that. And then I started another business, and I did the same thing. And I started another business, I did the same thing, and guess what? Started making a lot of money. And at that point, you have to figure out, what are you gonna do with this money? Well, conventional wisdom would tell you that you should find a good wealth advisor and just write him a check. And by that time, the idea, you know, the Kiyosaki influence. And by the way, my dad was doing real estate for my entire life. I just didn't like the phone ringing and all the tenants, termites and tenants and all that junk. And so I was thinking, well, how can I do this in a way that I can invest but not make it a massive pain? And so that's where my journey began. And so it's been financial education, application, and ultimately, you know, teaching, too, in the way of, you know, writing books and doing the podcast.

So when. When did you have this sort of epiphany that, you know, you had the golden handcuffs? I mean, so many people would look at your life from the outside and say, well, here's a guy that has everything.

Yeah, well, it's funny because I did very briefly work for a company coming out of training, and I was doing lots of facelifts, and I was. I went from making, I don't know, my residency year, my chief residency year in San Francisco. I went from making 40, $50,000 a year that year, and the next year, I think I Made a half million the first year out. And I was super happy. I mean I was like, wow, this is a lot of money. And the funny thing was though, after a little bit I started thinking, gosh, who owns this place?

Right?

And wait a second, he's making a lot more money than me. So that's kind of where I got it. I think I just got the entrepreneurial bug. And I have to again, just say it's a lot of it. I just owe to Robert Kiyosaki's books and I just, I really had the Purple Book story and I just, it was a mindset shift. And so rather than looking for ways I could be a worker, be and make a lot of money, which at that point I could, I was starting to look at, okay, what's the next level? How can I be the guy who's, who's benefiting from all of the labor but you know, not just doing the whole hours for dollars thing that we all know that at the end of the day, even if you're super high paid, like I was relatively speaking at the time, it was still like an know, finite amount of time I had in my life. And so, you know, I had a cap and like the idea to me now thinking of a half million dollar salary sounds kind of depressing. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it sounds depressing. Why? Because it's a salary, right? It's what you make. No. Pretty much no matter what. And that's depressing.

Yeah. Scott. Todd Buck's like our guy, isn't he?

He, I mean, like we, we should like, I don't know, like we should put them on our billboard.

Okay.

Yeah. I mean, I mean it's because, you know, it's so true that, you know, we have, we can always make more money, but we can't get more time. And oftentimes the cliche is, well, you know, doctors make the worst entrepreneurs or worst business people. And it's not as, you know, these are highly educated, really bright, hard working, you know, ambitious people. So why aren't they sort of more entrepreneurial?

That's exactly why, Mark. That's exactly why. See, that's the thing that I figured out and I talked to. I've had a chance to get to know Robert Kiyosaki well and you know, he's always talking about A students working for C students and all that stuff. Right? But I told him, you know what, there's a reason for this. And the reason for that is that when you're an A student and you go through school, you're always succeeding. And when you succeed, it's like a dopamine hit. Right. And it's a positive feedback. You keep wanting to succeed. You keep wanting people to pat you on the back. And you and I as entrepreneurs know that entrepreneurial endeavors are inherently risky and there is a risk of failure no matter what. Now, if all you've had is in your life is success, why in the world would you go down that rabbit hole? That, that's why.

Yeah, you know, that's, that's, that's so true. And you see it. There's a great book that even, you know, talks about this. It's, it's Carol Dweck and she talks about that mindset of a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset, where a fixed mindset, the, you know, the children are getting the, the message, you're smart. Right. And, well, what does that mean? I'm smart? And then as soon as reality hits and they get the first B on the test, they're like, whoa. It really throws them for a loop where the growth mindset says, well, I got to be on that test, but I can work harder next time. And it's not fixed. I'm not set here. I can just, I can grow and do all that. I think that book is Mindset. Is that Scott, you know, that book?

I think it is. I can't remember the exact name of, but I think that's, I think you're on it.

Yeah.

So let's kind of, you know, go into wealth formula, baking, Velocity plus. What are those terms mean?

You know, those are. So the notion behind the whole show is trying to unveil the secrets of the wealthy. Right. I mean, one of the things that I've did during that period, you know, I finished my training in around 2008, 2009, and you know, what is it, 2018 now? But for the first few years I was just kind of stumbling around figuring out how do I do this if I'm not going to invest like everybody else, how do I invest? Right. So really what it came down to is for me to really try to explore some of these strategies that I had a hunch were there that the ultra wealthy were using. And I just wanted to know if I could use them too, or did it require me to have $100 million or could I do it as a high paid professional? So wealth Formula Banking and Velocity plus are part of that journey is discovering these interesting, interesting strategies that actually most people don't know that are available to them. Wealth Formula banking is a type of strategy that allows you to utilize a type of life insurance product that ultimately, you know, effectively acts as a high interest bank account. But when you invest, when you invest in the money, invest that money into something, it actually allows you to invest that money and then have it still growing in the initial account, therefore making it. So you're investing your money in two places at the same time. It's a little confusing, hard to explain in a nutshell, but that is how it works. And that's wealth formula banking and Velocity plus is a similar and by the way, wealth formula banking. So if you're a cash flow investor, that is a phenomenal approach, right? I mean, you could either invest and get your 10% cash on cash or you could get 10% cash on cash plus an additional 4% compounding in this account or something like that. So why not? So that's one thing. Velocity plus is a different product. It's also based in the insurance world. But this one actually blew my mind because, listen, I'm not a Wall street guy, right? I don't like stocks and all that because I just, I can't. I don't get it. I just don't get it, Mark. And if I don't get it, I'm just not interested usually. But here's the thing, what Velocity plus does, and this is a product that really was only for people who were 20 million-plus until very recently. What this does is say you're a guy who likes to invest in the stock market and you're used to it and you want exposure to the S&P 500. What if you could do the same thing and take all of the, pretty much all the upside of the stock market every year and when it crashes or corrects, not take any of the downside. Pretty good deal, right? At that point, I'm actually interested in this product. And that is, that's Velocity plus in a nutshell. It's complicated because it's effectively using, it's utilizing these strategies that involve options. You know, it's basically a long option on the s and P500 and either it comes through or it doesn't. So you can only make money and not lose money. And of course, when you have something like that, banks would love to loan you money for it because there's very little risk of you losing money. There's basically no risk. So you can leverage this up, right? So now if the stock market makes 7% in a year, you actually make 19 or 20% in a year. And if the market goes down by 20%, you lose nothing. So that's what it is.

That's really cool. That's really cool.

Check it out.

I mean, it's crazy. It's.

I mean, and this stuff is rampant, Mark, and I'm telling you, this is what I love to do. I just love to figure out these products that all these ultra wealthy people have. And now I live in Santa Barbara, so they're everywhere around me. And it's just like, you got to be kidding me. How come I didn't know about that?

So why real assets as opposed to stock, bonds and mutual funds?

Well, usually, I mean, obviously when I talk about Velocity plus, that is not, you know, that's not a real, not the way I define real assets. That's just a risk. You know, if you, if you want to be in the stock market and only make money and not lose it, that's an option. But real assets for me make more sense, right? I mean, ultimately, when I talk about real assets, I'm talking about real estate. You know, I'm talking about precious metals to a certain extent. I'm talking about things that you can see, touch and feel. And the reason that I prefer them is if you take Velocity plus out of the picture and all you do is you're investing in the equity markets, right? You just have very, very little control. And it just really not clear why things go up and down. And then 2008, of course, boom, before you know it, all this money evaporated from everybody's retirement account, right? Why? Because of a bank failure? Because Wall street got greedy. Well, guess what? People who owned property, cash flowing, real estate, for example, at that point, like my dad, their property values went way down. And some of them, if they bought, if they didn't buy smart, they lost their properties. But a lot of guys like my dad, he was like, okay, I'm still cash flowing on my property. And now they're saying my property is not worth as much, but who cares? I don't care. I wasn't trying to sell it anyway. I still got cash flow coming in, right? That's what people don't get. And that's where, like, we get misled by Wall street because they show these ideas of, you know, you know, one market follows the other. That's true. The markets do. The real estate markets and the equity markets, they do correlate. But if you're investing for cash flow, it's a completely different game if you do it right. And so that's the idea.

Scott. Todd, what Are your thoughts?

No, I think it's amazing because essentially I think a lot about this, Mark, like with our land. So essentially there will come a time in which the real estate market shifts on us and some portion of our notes will fall out. But at the same time it doesn't really matter because essentially I've got people that are paying down my cost basis in the land. So if I have to turn around and sell even at a lower price than what I could today, it doesn't matter because it's all relative because every single month someone is paying down my note. So then I can kind of go and change that whole model because I'm buying the cash flow. And essentially, I mean like cash flow is king. Even if you go look at the stock market again, I'm not a fan of the stock market either. But when you go look at it, the stocks to buy are not the high flyers. The stocks to buy are the dividend paying stocks that are going to generate cash every single quarter to you because it's the cash that counts.

Right? Right. Buck, what's some of the worst advice you hear given in your area of expertise?

Well, my area of expertise being, I think investing in general. I think some of the things that people are told in general, conventional wisdom in finance, like for example, paying off your debt. Well, I happen to be a big fan of debt. You have to know how to use it. Right. But I will tell you that I truly believe, Mark, that it is virtually, unless you're like an entertainer or something like that, it is virtually impossible to become wealthy without debt. And so that's one of the worst pieces of advice I think people get is try to, try to, you have, say maybe you buy apartment building or you buy, you buy some kind of rental property and you've got a nice spread between your mortgage and your cash flow and you're trying to pay down debt. Why would you do that? Because once the money's sitting in that property, it's dead. Right. I'm a big believer in the velocity of money and just trying to turn things as quickly as possible. And so that would probably be the worst advice. And then of course saving money, which is probably even worse. If you look at, if you put money in the bank, what does it do? Then that's the worst investment you can possibly make because it's a guaranteed loser with inflation. The other thing with debt, of course, is with debt with inflation over time, if you have good debt, it'll actually get washed away by inflation. So there's so many of these little conventional wisdom things about saving money and not using debt that are actually completely the opposite of what the, you know, the affluent do.

It's so true. It's so true. It's like. It's like we're running in the same circles. Buck. I can't.

I like what he just said.

Like, I mean, think about what he just said, Mark, though, like, good debt gets washed away with inflation. Like, that's something you don't really even think about too often, right? Like, think about, like, debt erodes debt.

I mean, if you think about it, right? My parents in a house. Yeah. My parents had bought a house when I was a kid for $100,000. And they had a debt. They had debt there of $80,000. You know, 20 years later, the house was worth like $300,000. And guess what, how much debt they had. They. They still had, you know, they had a mortgage that started out at $80,000. Right. So now it's at 50. And now the actual value of that $50,000 that they owed went way down. They've eroded debt, Right. It's printing money. It's printing your own money.

It's so funny because one of my buddies, who's really just super conservative, is bragging to me that he's paying down his mortgage twice as fast so that he wouldn't pay the, you know, so much in interest on his. On his house. And I'm thinking, I said, well, you can't eat equity, right. That was just like, I'm trying to explain to him. And then, then he's like, oh, that does make sense. And so then he bought some rental property. I'm like, see the difference? And so he kind of got it.

Yeah. And then there's this entire other thing there that's called asset protection. Right. I mean, listen, what's the best way you can protect your property? Well, if you've got a loan on it, you don't have much equity in it. If you just pay off your house and you're sitting on it, you have no mortgage. I mean, you're just a sitting duck. That's crazy, right? The best possible asset protection you can have is some kind of lien from a lender. Now, I will tell you that. I know, and I've seen this personally. One of the strategies, another strategy of the ultra wealthy is called equity stripping. I don't know if you're familiar with that concept.

I have heard of equity stripping. Yeah. Can you explain it? Yeah.

So basically you have like a third party. You have A third party company, and obviously it needs to be designed well. But basically you have a third party company that maybe you own or somebody else owns that you can essentially put liens on property that you own, if it's done properly. And when you do that, you have got. You basically stripped out the equity. So you may have a third party company that has a lien on your property for $100,000 and it was $100,000 of equity you had on that property. Guess what? There's no equity in that property. So if you get sued, there's nothing to get. So that is a massive, massive strategy for a lot of people, particularly ultra wealthy people. Especially if you take, say, put that strategy in with an offshore like a Cook Islands Trust or something like that and throw a lien onto something else. There is just an insane amount of stuff you can do to make yourself bulletproof. And a lot of it's just with Lean.

So you have a book. Why not just have a home equity line? A heloc?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean that, that's very real too. If you're actually using that, then why not? I mean, again, it's just about. My point is that, yeah, if you. So if you want to pull out, if you use a HELOC or you use just your everyday mortgage, you're going to be able to pull out a fair amount of equity. I'm talking about pulling out the rest. Right, right. And pulling it down, making it look like a turnip.

Right? Yeah. I love it. Scott. Todd, any other questions?

No, no, I'm still trying to put my brain around. I'm still trying to put my brain around the third party lean on your house. That's great.

Wow. So, Buck, you've got a podcast. What is the podcast?

Sorry, you went out for a second. What?

Oh, I'm sorry. So for your Wealth Formula podcast, what are some of your. Who are some of your guests and what is your focus?

Yeah, so Wealth Formula podcast is really about, you know, what I try to do is I try to unveil a lot of these secrets, right? And I try to create a different investing paradigm, a different wealth creation paradigm than what people are used to. And what I really try to do is introduce concepts, different ways of investing in things outside of Wall Street. And you know, my guess are, well, you know, typically they're, they're anywhere from people who are, you know, who work in asset classes that maybe are less understood or not. Not a lot of people know about them. Like say, for example, land. I mean, that Would be a very interesting. Love to have you on the podcast. For example, you know, life settlements, that's another thing that a lot of people don't know about. It's basically buying life insurance policies from octogenarians who were sick and want their money now instead of in the afterlife. And, you know, things like that. And then there's also, you know, guests like Robert Kiyosaki was on the show, or we had the, you know, the chief economist of Fannie Mae. So it's a high level. At a high level. It's both a practical, you know, how can I invest, how should I invest? And also things that are much more paradigm shifting and educational.

I love it. I love it. All right, last questions before we get to the tip of the week. Crypto. You like it?

Yeah, I have a cryptocurrency hedge fund, so I do like it.

Okay, what do you like about it?

Okay, so here's the thing. Cryptocurrency people mostly are afraid of crypto, and they think it's a big sham, et cetera. There may be. I mean, listen, was there a bubble? Yeah, but this is a, you know, this is a brand with. The way. I think the way to look at this is this is a brand new technology, and I've done a pretty deep dive into this. The underlying technology is distributed ledger technology and distributed ledger technology. Ultimately what that does is, is it just takes the middleman out of everything. Whether that's, you know, everybody talks about companies being the Uber of this or Uber of that. I'm talking about replacing Uber because you don't need Uber. You can just have the end user and, and the consumer, or you have the consumer and the provider connecting. You can, you can have a somebody who's creating energy selling directly to somebody who's buying energy. You can have artists who are creating music selling directly to people buying music. So it's far more than just bitcoin. Bitcoin is a storage of value and currency. It is an entire revolution which I really do believe will fundamentally change everything. The way we do things right now is impactful as the Internet. And so to not get exposure to this, I think, to me is sort of risky. Because, listen, I don't think you should invest your retirement money in here. But like I say to my investors in this fund, I said, well, the only way I want you to invest in this is if you were going to buy a new BMW this year. And you decided, okay, I'll skip the BMW, I'll buy, you know, I'll buy into the cryptocurrency fund instead of why? Because that BMW is guaranteed to lose money. It's not going to make you any money. It's going to zero. And here we have an opportunity potentially to be, you know, we're in a $400 billion market that if it goes to a trillion in the next 12 months, which a lot of people believe it will because of the institutional money that's about to get in in May and June, it could really make a lot of money. So it's speculative, no doubt, and it's not part of my core investment strategy, but it's something I like.

All right, fantastic. Well, we're at that point now, Buck, where we're going to ask you for your tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something actionable where the art of passive income listeners can go right now, improve their businesses, improve their lives. I think this mentorship has been amazing, but we're going to ask you for one more time. Sure.

So which one do you want? You want the tip?

Sure.

So start over. Which. What do you want first?

Whatever you want. I mean, it could just your weekly or a resource or a book. Anything you want.

Okay, so tip of the week. Let's see. I would say that one thing that I have learned is that there's a saying. If you're gonna go into the dark, into a dark cave for the first time, bring someone who's been there before. Right. So this is very, very important. And I think this goes to kind of what you do, Mark, is you have discovered this, this area of investing in land. People like me are looking at it saying, wow, I mean, that sounds interesting. Maybe I could do that. Now the cheapskate's gonna go in there and say, I'm gonna go do this myself. Right. And then he's gonna lose thousands and thousands of dollars. Or you can find somebody who's been there, who knows their way around and pay them a little bit. Don't be cheap. Bring somebody who's been there before and it will pay in massive dividends. I spend last year I spent about $100,000 on masterminds and educational events. And I easily, you know, easily came out way ahead on that.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I always 10x my return on any type of coaching or mastermind. It's like the best investment you can ever make is in yourself. It's so true. And so this has been great, Scott. Todd, how about your tip of the week?

Mark, I'm going to take a. I'm going to take kind of a thought this week, right? You know, like, I got to get more like the Zen master kind of quotes of the week kind of a deal. But, you know, the thought came in really about focusing, right? Like, it's so easy to get off course and like get business add to listen to all these things and crypto and all this other stuff. And I think that really the best thing that you can do is get laser focused a lot like what Buck was saying. Just get laser focused on a strategy, Stick with that strategy and play it out. And I think you'll be amazed at how you can move that needle.

I love it. I love it. Well, my tip of the week is learn more about Dr. Buck Joffre. Go to wealthformula.com he's got a great podcast with amazing guests and yours truly is going to be one of them. So check that out and I'll have the link to wealthformula.com as well in the show notes. I do want to remind everybody the only way, the only way we're going to get quality guests like a Dr. Buck Joffre is if you do us three little favors. You got to subscribe, you got to rate, and you got to review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of that review. And to support@thelangeek.com we are going to send you for free our passive income launch kit, which is normally $97 course. So please do that. Today's podcast is sponsored by GeekPay IO, the only way to automate getting paid and managing your borrowers. It's a one time set it and forget it system. Learn more GeekPay IO and set up your first note for free at thelandgeek.com GeekPay Scott, are we good? We're good. Okay. Buck, are we good?

Yeah, we're good. Thanks for having me.

All right, well, I want to thank the listeners and Scott, you ready to do this? Wait, Scott, you're on mute. Still on mute? Yeah.

Let's go.

All right, ready? One, two, three, let freedom ring. Buck is like, oh, if I knew they were doing that.

I didn't know you were.

I didn't know you were like, oh, no. That's the hokey part of the podcast, Buck. We don't tell our guests. We're gonna do that at the end.

Got it? Got it. Well, now I know.

Now you know. All right, thanks everybody and we'll see everyone next time. 20.