Why You Need To Think Outside Of The Box When It Comes To Building Wealth

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 podcast because we have two guests. It's like a tandem. It's like a team. But I'd be remiss if I didn't properly introduce my co host. You know him, you love him. The professor, the Brain, Six Sigma. Scott Todd from scotttodd.net landmodo.com and most importantly, if not automating your Craigslist and your Facebook postings. Postingdomination.com TheLangi Scott Todd. How are you, Mark?

I'm great. How are you?

I'm psyched. I am psyched because not only am I fully caffeinated, and not only am I gonna speak about three times faster than my guests, our guests are kind of a big deal for our listeners in the sense that, like, we're all sort of singing from the same song sheet. Right. So let me introduce you to our two guests, Russ Morgan and Joey Murray from wealthwithoutwallstreet.com Gentlemen, how are you on this fine morning?

We're fantastic, Mark. Thanks for having us on.

Mark, I don't know what your deal is with us speaking slow. We're in the South. Like, we actually speak fast. For Birmingham.

No, no. I mean, yeah, absolutely. I mean, for Birmingham, you guys are like speaking like a ferret on a double cappuccino, but for the rest of the country. Right.

By the way, I want to be on this show as often as possible because nobody else calls me kind of a big deal. Like, I could get used to that.

No, no. Let's blow up your egos. So in the spirit of blowing up your egos, give us your backgrounds. Russ, you go first, since you've already sort of given yourself the moniker, the better looking guy.

Well, I appreciate you say that. When Joey actually got on the calls, I mean, we need to remind him of that from time to time, but he is the stallion. I'm the idea guy on our podcast. My background is I got in the financial business in 2004 as a certified financial planner. And 2008, I realized I was really nothing more than a financial money babysitter. And just like most babysitters, I left the kids, you know, to run and fend for themselves. I was asleep at the wheel. And since 2009, we've, you know, kind of gone contrarian to the. To the financial markets, have completely left Wall street into the rearview mirror and have been looking for Ways to grow wealth outside of that. And that's where I met The Italian Stallion, Mr. Joey Murray.

Yes. Yes. Actually, I'm, I'm very much in line with what you're talking about, Mark. My background is real estate. I was the mortgage guy for 11 years and had a blast doing it, enjoyed it very much. But started to realize that the traditional ways of building wealth and just kind of blindly putting money in my 401k at the time and things like that were just not lining up with where I wanted to be. They weren't getting me any closer to being financially free. I was constantly pushing down that finish line to my 60s when quite honestly, I started learning from guys like the idea guy that that could be a lot closer and give me more control and more access to my hard earned cash. And so, yeah, I became a disciple of Russ Morgan and started learning things outside of Wall street and then joined him four years later. That was in 2014 that we joined up forces.

So for most people when they think of the term wealth without Wall street, my immediate head goes to, oh, if it's wealth without Wall street, these are real estate guys, right? Scott, Todd, what's your. What's. When you hear wealth without Wall street, which. What's the first thing you think of?

I think of insurance.

You think of insurance. Okay. So when you guys, you know, say wealth without Wall street, what are some of the ways that you do build wealth without Wall street for clients?

Yeah, So I think the best way to introduce that from the, from the beginning, we use kind of the Wall street mindset. The person, our villain in our story, that's, you know, most people, they think that there's a traditional way. I have to be a wage slave, right? What Robert Kiyosaki says, they have to have a W2 job in order to make a living. That's the only option there exists. If I'm gonna, you know, earn money somewhere, I'm gonna buy mutual funds. It's gonna be done in the stock market. And there's this traditional mindset. So from the beginning, like our whole kind of contrarian logo and moniker for our business is to be different, to look outside of the box. So we actually, we do all of those things you mentioned. We do insurance, we do real estate, we do business investing, we do lending. There's not one tool that we kind of fall to. We believe there's more of, you know, there's things that you're naturally inclined to, there's things that you're passionate about. And we believe that the first thing you got to invest in is yourself. And then from there then it's like do things better, right? Keep more the money that we make. But at the end of the day, as Joey said, the biggest thing we're always falling back on is that we don't want to have to work for the rest of our lives. And so we're trying to find passive income streams in the areas that we all are best suited to do. And, and our job is really just kind of partner along side of those and help those things better.

I love it. I love it. What do you guys believe in the sense that like that other people think is crazy. So you guys believe this is normal or cool or wise, but other people think it's just absolutely crazy. What would you say that is?

Oh, there's a long list of that. But I mean that is just going along with what Russell was talking about as it relates to that mindset. So what's normal to most Americans right now is to lose access to capital. Banks have told us, hey, you know what, a 15 year mortgage is actually better for you than a 30 year mortgage. We say that's a terrible idea. That's giving more of my hard earned cash on a monthly basis to a bank for a very small insignificant discount in an interest rate. Like that's the smoke screen that's been given to us by the banking industry to tell us, you know, hey, this is for your benefit, when in fact it's really for the bank. There's also the idea that, you know, putting money away in things like qualified plans are to benefit us for tax deferral, like tax deferral is a benefit to us. And quite honestly, we say, well, let's look at his history and talk more about the actual taxes that have been paid in the past versus where we're at today. And also the variable of what taxes will be in the future that nobody can with any certainty tell you what it will be, but yet we're putting large percentages of our income into things that we have no control over and have, you know, no idea what the taxes will be in the future. So those things are just right off the out of the gate things that I would, I would question and I would ask people to consider alternatives.

Well, and I think too, I mean this is sort of reiterating what I said a second ago, but I think we believe that taking over control of our finances actually will lead to greater prosperity and to less stress. Where I think the average person on the street thinks giving my money away and we use the term money babysitter because that's really what most people look for when we hear the term passive income. We believe this is truly that I can give my money to somebody, I don't have to do anything and it's imaginary, going to come back tenfold. Everybody wants that. And when people call us and they say, hey, what is it that you can invest my money in? We're like, wait a second. No, like what we do is participatory, right? Like you're going to have to be active, you're going to have to be involved. And if you're not wanting to be, then you're probably not going to be that successful and we're not going to be a good fit. We're going to frustrate you and you're going to frustrate us because we know that, you know, just like hearing your story, Mark, whenever you were on our podcast and you talked about how you went down to the courthouse, how you did those first few deals, how you actively started getting involved, that's where led to your freedom, right? That gave you your corporate breakout moment. Well, that's what we believe too. Is that actually more control of our finances, us taking control actually lead to that prosperity, to that stress free way of life that most people are seeking?

Yeah, absolutely. Scott. Todd, what's your thoughts?

Well, I mean, I do think that there's a big myth about passive income, right? People say like, oh, I just generate all this passive income, but in fact, passive income is in fact, I think very active in its piece. Where I think people misunderstand passive income is if for some reason you're not working this month, the money still shows up, right? Health, maybe you want to retire, but there's a lot of work that goes into building passive income. And Mario, I mean, I was looking at someone the other day, they like our business model and what they've decided to do is they decided just to put a team in place from day one, but they're not really going to be a part of it. They're gonna let somebody else do it. So it's almost like they want the passive income. Like, hey, someone else can go do the work, but at the end of the day, those people can leave. Like unless they're partners or unless they're involved with you, they can leave. And in fact, even partners can leave at some point. So even if you're learning something on how to build passive income, you better know how to do it because otherwise you're back at the mercy of someone else. And you have no. No control over what happens to you. You got to be active.

Yeah. There is literally no such thing as passive income in the sense that, okay, let's say we all get a billion dollars. We inherit a billion dollars. Like, oh, now we're gonna have passive income. We can just live off the interest. Well, you still have to do something with the billion dollars.

Right.

You still want to be efficient with your capital, and to be efficient with your capital actually takes work. So even in that scenario, you still have to do something. And so I agree with you guys. What's the worst advice as of today, you're seeing or hearing given in your industry?

The worst advice. Okay, see, Stallion, I was giving you a chance. He always gets on our podcast that I'm always talking. So there I give him a chance, and he just stopped.

I thought it was your turn. I'm sorry.

You know, Russ, you know, we know we call that what the Birmingham pause. I just thought. You guys are thinking.

Not a lot of thinking going on.

Yeah, we think by using our mouse, it's not a whole lot of thinking that goes on. The worst advice. I mean, again, I would have to repeat myself in the fact I believe that giving your money away is the advice being given. Right. So here's the worst advice. Is the guy on the street the worst investment that exists that I know, and I participated, unfortunately, and it's, you know, getting it out. There are mutual funds. I believe mutual fund investing is one of the worst thing people can do with their money personally, just because they're so far removed from the actual result of it that they are at the end of the line receiving a percentage of it and don't have to take my. My word from it. What is it? John Bogle or whatever, he's the one that said that, you know, mutual funds where you put up all the money, you take all the risk, and you get, like, a third of the profit. But there. There is in the line. I mean, and that's the hugest. You know, that's a huge industry out there where the, you know, 90% of the population owns a mutual fund at this point, that is investing. And I think that that's one of the worst ones I see.

Joey.

Oh, you know, I think it's just all the common ideas that are constantly separating us from our capital if we would wake up to what is actually going on. In fact, one of our mentors said, if you know what's going on, you'll know what to do. And I think that is. That's what kind of happened. For me, this is eight or nine years ago. And for Russ, you know, 10 plus years ago, once you understand what is going on around you, you start to realize, man, I can. I don't have to give money up to somebody else. Like, they. They are not necessarily smarter than me. In fact, I'll give this kind of an example. We go over with A lot of our clients are entrepreneurs and business owners. Okay. Their greatest investment outside of themselves is their business. If I have a dollar and I can go and put that dollar to work in my business, I have a known entity or a known, you know, substance there of my business, that can come back to me three, four, five fold, right? I can do the math, and I can. I can know that by hiring this person, it should be create this or by adding this software, it should make this more efficient. And I can. I can look at, you know, historical data and make a decision. But if I take that same dollar and I go and give it to somebody else in Wall Street, I'm just going to beat up on Wall street because that's what we do. And they say, well, we'll give you 10 cents on that dollar. Why would I trade the three or four dollars I could have earned in my business for the 10 cents that Wall Street's trying to hopefully, you know, provide back to me? And that's the lie. That's the kind of misconception that we're constantly being told.

Yeah. You know, it's so funny. You guys are really preaching to the choir here, Scott and I. But I do want to play devil's advocate, because I can imagine a listener listening to this like an entrepreneur like ourselves, or, you know, let's say. Let's just say like a solo practitioner, let's just say a doctor. Right. And they're saying, oh, yeah, that's. That's great for you guys, but I talked to my financial planner, and he used the word diversification, and that made a lot of sense to me. I need to diversify because what happens if something goes wrong in the economy and my business goes down 20%? I put all my eggs in one basket. What do you guys say to the term diversification?

This is one of Russ's favorites, so I'm going to let you rock on this.

Diversification is such a lie. I mean, I know that you worked in, you know, in corporate finance in the early days, and you. That was a term that we were all taught, right? I mean, that was the biggest thing. Diversification, asset allocation, modern portfolio theory, all this stuff, as if we do all those things, right? That was the line I used to use on the mutual fund as it was like a pane window. Rock goes through it, right? Only one part of the pane is busted and not the whole window. But that's just such a lie. That is. I mean, we saw that in 2008. What happened? Everything came crashing down. Everybody fled to cash right now. But there are businesses that thrive throughout that time. So here's the thing is that we've got to add value to the world. And if we're not adding value to the world, if. I'm a physician, by the way, my wife's a dentist. We own a dental office. My brother in law is an orthopedic surgeon. My other brother in law is a vet. So my client base is physicians. So you speak to that market. I know that business. But it goes back to we got to be adding value. We can't be assuming that everybody's just going to keep walking in our door. So we're going to have to be investing. And you know, one of the things that Joey and I do a lot with our clients is we get really involved in tax planning. And I don't mean like, let me write down your how much income you paid last year and tell you what the tax bracket is. I'm talking about actually let's be on the offensive. Let's like go out there and do some things. And one of the biggest things we do is in marketing. And that's new to that world, right? I mean, the four of us understand marketing. We do it constantly. We're on a podcast. But a physician, for instance, or a traditional brick and mortar business, they do a little bit, but they're not active in that space typically, or they're not keeping up with the ways that their consumer is wanting to buy. So I say diversification is a lie talk. Look at Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett says diversifying your money is diversifying your ability to earn it. I mean, we, you know, he doesn't, people think, oh, well, he's this huge investor and he buys businesses. That's what he buys. He buys businesses that he knows and he can run and put his management system in. He doesn't go buy real estate, he says, just go buy gold. He's not buying things that he doesn't understand. So when people hear diversification, they assume I need to like not put all my eggs in one basket. Again, that's a lie being told to people so that they can manage the money because they've got mutual funds to sell and they've got other stocks to buy. You need to invest in the one thing that you understand. If it's real estate, go all in. If it's business, go all in. If it's commodities or PA assets, go all in. But you better be active and you better know what's going to happen and be able to control it. Because at the end of the day, if everything's hits the fan, I want to be in the position where at least I knew I was the one who lost it and I was in control of making it back versus looking up like I was in 2008, 2009, palms up, saying, what happened? I thought, you know, I thought, this modern portfolio theory is going to work. Why did I lose 50%? You know that Those are the days where I'm like, no, I'm not going to do that anymore.

Scott. Todd, what are your thoughts.

Man? So, I mean, I'm laughing because I just think about. I think about, like, all the lies. Like, we're. We're told lots of lies, right? We just accept them. And Mark, I worked for a publicly traded company. I was a VP there. And I can tell you, like, I left that company, I sold out. While I left the company, I sold out all my. I cleared my liquid, I cleared my mutual funds, I cleared my stock. And I went to the things that I can control very, very similar to what they're saying is, because I want to be able to control that. And quite honestly, I've seen the way these Fortune 500 companies, like, report earnings and how they work. And it's very frightening. Like, when you see it from the inside, it's very frightening because, honestly, the numbers are manufactured, if you will, the results are manufactured to meet Wall Street's requirements. Okay? So, you know, it's Michael Dell, for example. Michael Dell took the Dell company private because he's like, you know what, Tired of playing the games for Wall street to try to get the numbers and to meet the analyst expectations. I'm just going to take it private and I'm going to rebuild the company the way I want it to. And he's done just that. And the company has flourished because when he was trying to satisfy Wall street all the time, he wasn't making the right investments, he wasn't making the right decisions, he wasn't doing the right things for the shareholders. And then we private, and he doesn't have to dictate like, oh, well, we're going to miss our earnings this quarter. Now he can Invest in the business. Now he can put the money where he needs to and now he can work on the projects that make the most sense. And I think that that's what happens with these big companies is everybody thinks that they're security by investing in the big companies. And the reality is, is that the big companies, the executives there, are simply trying to pump up the stock price. Like that's their focus. Can I beat the earnings that the Wall street expects? And if I can, then the stock price goes up and you know, everybody celebrates. Oh, look at the stock price going up. But what they're not seeing is they're not seeing like, hey, we're not, we're not basically building a strategic plan moving forward. We're going to get slammed at some point in the future when Uber shows up with this new technology that has disrupted the entire business and they're going to be like they're caught off guard. So at that point I was just like, I'm out. I'll control my own money.

Yeah, you know, it reminds me of is I just finished the John Kerry you book Bad Blood about the story of Theranos. And so here's this company that was just a complete lie. And investors lost hundreds of millions of dollars. Rupert Murdoch himself lost $125 million a lie. So it just goes to show you, like even, you know, billionaires who you would think are smart and savvy, like they can, when they take, they make this sort of passive investment, they can get duped. So he should have just, you know, bought another news network just fine. So. Well, guys, the mentorship, this podcast has been really, really great. But now it's time to put you on the spot and ask you for your tips of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something actionable where the art of passive income listeners can go improve their businesses, improve their lives. What do you got?

Alright, so I'm going to, I'm going to start this because this is one of the things I learned early in business is that, you know, I started working for, you know, big huge corporation right out of college. And the one thing that I realized as I was managing this business is there was two ways to make money, right? You could grow the business and try to have as much income as you possibly could, but there's expenses, right? It's not all about income, it's about how much we keep. And so one of the things as I've been doing this for the last 14 years, I've seen people go out and try to seek and Follow return and try to make as much money as they possibly can. And some of them been very successful at it. But, like, most business owners were really good at making money, but we're really bad at keeping it. And one of the biggest expenses we have personally is in taxes. And that's where, you know, Joey and I have really kind of like, focused our business and our practice. I'm gonna let you hit it, Joey, but I think this is the one area, if you're. If you're out there, you're paying 75,000 or $100,000 of taxes or above. This is something you can't miss because the return on this is infinite because you're not putting money in it to get it. It already exists. That's dollars that are going out to. I don't like to say Uncle Sam because somebody, some people may have an Uncle Sam they actually like. It's the Internal Revenue Service, and I don't know anybody likes it.

That's exactly right. And you know the bottom line. So first I'm gonna throw out the resource. Okay, so it's free tax call. Wealthwithoutwallstreet.com free tax call. This is, as Russ mentioned, this is found money. This is utilizing legal tax codes. And this is not like ideas that someone came up with. This is tax. These are tax codes that should be, if they're aligned correctly, on your behalf, saving you 30, 40, 50% of what you're paying out. Okay, so you do the math. If you're paying 300,000 in taxes, you should be saving 100, 150,000 in taxes. Now, what does that mean? That's. Those are dollars that again, would have been unnecessarily going somewhere that you don't like to putting them to work on your behalf, whether that means improving your lifestyle or in our case, of course, we're going to help you to create additional passive income and putting that to work on your behalf and things that you do know and understand. So this is the path to even faster financial freedom by capturing something was going out the door anyway.

So once you go there, you're going to get access to a webinar that we've put together that's going to give you some things that you can walk away with, you can implement. But also there's probably going to be some things that you're going to want access to some of our partners who are tax attorneys and CPAs, which we are not, by the way, but you're going to want access to those because, you know, these Aren't things, every one of those things that you want to just go out and do on your own, you're going to want some advice and help. And so, yeah, please seek that resource. It's been a tremendous success for us personally and the clients that we're working with. So that's our free tip for the week. Mark.

I love it. I love it. And is it important that the people that go on the webinar be huge fans of Lynyrd Skynyrd?

Totally unnecessary.

Totally unnecessary. Even with the whole Alabama thing.

Yeah.

What's that, Scott?

Alabama state song theme song.

Yeah. Sweet home. Yeah.

Sweet home Alabama.

Yeah, that's right. Don't, don't get Rust started on the college football deal with Alabama because he's an Auburn fan. But, you know, we do have that going for us as well, that rivalry.

That's great. That's great. So, yeah, that's fantastic. I'll have a link to the webinar on the show Notes. And I have to tell you guys, like, just hearing you guys talk, I went to Brookstone the other day, they're going out of business. And I bought, I bought this blanket, this weighted blanket. It was regularly 150 bucks. I got two for 75 bucks. And listening to you guys felt like the weighted blanket, like, I just felt more secure and less anxious about how I'm operating my capital and reinvesting into the business and thinking about taxes like it's, it just made me feel so much better about diversification. Because sometimes, you know, that monkey mind, like, well, you know, you go on CNBC and you think, oh, conventional, conventional, conventional. And here we are bucking the trend, right? And sometimes you feel kind of insecure about it and anxious. But listening to you guys, it's just like that. Just that weighted blanket around me, I feel so much better. So thank you.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, our natural tendency is to want to go the direction of everybody else because we like the herd being in the herd, being in a tribe kind of concept. But as entrepreneurs, as business owners, we've always broken the mold. We've always gone the opposite way. And we would say that's uncommon. And yet what is everyone else doing? They're doing common things. And so whenever it comes to our money, though, we've done this in life and our business, but yet when it comes to money, a lot of times we get suckered in to trying to follow the common when we're uncommon. And so that, you know, what Scott said earlier, things that you guys get involved in Insurance, you know, real estate businesses, lending, any of those kind of things. A lot of those things are uncommon, but they're not uncommon to the wealthy. They're not uncommon to the successful entrepreneurs. They're just uncommon to Dave Ramsey's, you know, following. They're uncommon to the average, everyday, ordinary, you know, person who doesn't have access to this information and is not listening to it. So from that standpoint, I hope we did make you feel comfortable because we're right there with you. We're uncommon.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, Scott Todd, what's your tip of the week?

Well, this tip is gonna feed right into the uncommonness of today's show, which is this book called the Am I Being Too Subtle by Sam Zell. Sam Zell is a self made billionaire. I always like reading books from like self made billionaires, not someone who just inherited their money. And here's a guy that has always gone against. He's a maverick, right? He's a business re. He's always gone against the conventional thinking of what the crowd is doing and clearly it has paid off with his net worth. And here's a guy that just thinks different. And it's great to kind of see that there are alternative thinkers out there.

I love it. Am I being too subtle? Straight talk from a business rebel, Sam Zell. Yeah, he's, he's huge. From Chicago, actually.

Kind of a big deal.

Man, he is a big deal. Actually.

He's.

Know what will really make him a big deal is when he's on this podcast like our guests were today.

That's right.

Which leads me to the segue of, you know, the only way that we're gonna get the quality of guests like a Russ And Joey from wealthwithoutwallstreet.com is if you do us three little favors. You got to subscribe, you got to rate, you got to review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of that review to supporthelandgeek.com and we're going to send you for free our $97 passive income launch kit. So please do that. I also just want to remind everybody, today's podcast is sponsored by flight school, which is the step by step way of actually creating true wealth passive income in our lucrative land investing niche. Taught by one of the greatest Sam Zell type land investors in the world, Scott Todd. So you've got no better Sherpa to take you up that mountain. To learn more about flight school, just go to thelandgeek.com training schedule. A call with dude buddy Scott Bossman or Mike the Zen master Zano. So, guys, are we good, man?

Good stuff.

Yeah. Mark, thanks for having us on today. This is awesome.

Thank you guys so much, and we really appreciate it. I want to thank the listeners. I want to thank Scott, Todd, and I just want to remind everybody to let freedom ring. Thanks, everybody. Russ and Joey are, like, that was a really awkward tagline.

I love it.

Like, did Mark just eat some grits before that and just kind of slow and kind of, like, carb heavy and. No, actually, no. Not that I'm opposed to eating grits for all those southerners out there. All right, thanks, everybody. See you next time.