TRP108: Taking Control and Ownership Over Your Money with Joey and Russ

January 25, 2021


Description

Joey and Russ of the Wealth Without Wall Street podcast share their experience of how they broke off from a typical financial planning firm to learn how to invest in cash flow assets to increase and build passive income. How did they get more time, freedom, and control over building something for themselves instead of building for someone else?


Transcription

Randy (00:03):

All right. Hey, I want to welcome you to today’s show. We’ve got an exciting episode. Friends of mine from Wealth without Wall Street, Joey Mure and Russ Morgan are with us here today. Welcome guys. Thank you so much for joining us. And I know our audience and listeners are going to be blessed today, for sure. Let me just give you a little bit of background on them. “Wealth without Wall Street,” the name says it all right. They are looking to help empower people to the power of passive income, getting away from the evils of Wall Street or the things that may go on there that instead of build you up can drag you down. I’m not going to steal all their thunder. I’ll let them talk to us a little bit more, but guys, welcome to the show today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Russ (00:51):

Oh man. We’re glad to be here. I mean, Randy, once we heard your story, we knew we had way too much in common. You broke free of Wall Street. We break free of Wall Street every day. We were just two peas in a pod. I love the fact that you started out as a typical financial planner/wealth advisor. I had that same background. I started a little bit later in the game than you, even though I’ve got some of that gray hair, I’m still a little bit younger than you, Randy, but I got a lot of the wear and tear on the tires because of that road. And I’m so glad that I know how that no longer have to do that. And really that’s how Joey and I met. Yeah. About in 2007, 2008. We met as friends at church actually. And, he said he wanted to start sending me referrals.

Joey (01:35):

I was in the mortgage business at the time. And of course, any mortgage, God knows you immediately take a referral meeting. I mean, that’s like a no brainer immediately hands me a book. And he says, Hey, by the way, in order for me to send you referrals, you got to read this book. And by the way, it’s $20. And I’m like, dude, I mean, that’s low down. Like most people, they ask you to read something. They give it to you, you know, but I, no matter what I read it, it changed my world. And so I’m grateful the $20 was well worth it. And it began me on a path to really change how I think about finances altogether. My family’s life was impacted so much over four years of working with Russ that I was like, I got to do this.

Joey (02:18):

Like, in fact, I’ll just share this with your audience. I was at a conference with Russ and I felt compelled. I felt like I had this question, like why don’t more people know about this? And I almost use just very few times. I can, I can point to this, but I felt like God said, why don’t you do it? Like, why aren’t you the one out there sharing it. And so it was almost like I had his thumb pressing into my back. And so that when you, you know, when you feel that you have to act on it, I went home and talked to my wife who was pregnant with our fourth daughter at the time she doesn’t work. I’m making well over $300,000 a year. And I’m like almost scared to tell her that this is what I feel like the Lord wants me to do.

Joey (03:03):

I tell her. And she says, I think you should do it. Has no hesitation. And I was like, okay, Lord check. I’m moving on. I’m moving on. This is the way to do it. But unfortunately, I was going literally cold turkey and had to literally go from over $300,000 a year to zero. And, I had some of the same experiences. You have people looking at me like I was crazy. Like, yeah, Joey, what are you thinking? You’re going to do financial stuff. Like you’re, you’re making all this money with mortgages and people respect you. You’re a moron. And then, subsequently, hopefully I’ve proved them wrong.

Randy (03:43):

I think a couple of great nuggets there. One, I think a lot of times you’ve got to pay to move forward, right? Like even if it was only $20, but again, like you’ve got to be willing to invest or you’ve got to be willing to pay the cost to move forward. Right. I mean, that’s just how it is with anybody. And then two, you’ve got to be willing to be able to venture into sometimes what may be the unknown. And again, I know that’s part of what you guys share with people. And same with us too. If somebody has known their 401k stock market accumulation model, they’ve got to be willing to take that step into the unknown. Now again, you did it because you said, Hey, I’m the guy I’m going to take that step.

Randy (04:27):

And it’s like, bam, you went from 300K to just starting at scratch. And so that was a much more, I’m sure, challenging faith moment for you. But nonetheless, for those of you all listening, you never get to the other side. If you don’t start swimming, right. You got to go. So I think too many times people will sit on the shore and look at the other side, wonder how good the other side could be, but don’t ever take that first step to put their toe in the water.

Joey (04:59):

Too true, too true. What is it? The Zig Ziglar quote. You don’t have to be great to start. You just have to start to be great for sure. And I knew that he was going to be great because I was his teacher, and he was all the wisdom and it was, it was short. So I knew it was going to be great.

Russ (05:23):

And it was just a blessing to have him come over. And I was transitioning out of this mindset of accumulation, the book he’s talking about as a book that I had been given, not too long before that called becoming your own banker and its whole message was, get your cash into your control. We know about the Bible’s golden rule, but the financial golden rule is those who have the gold make the rules.

Randy (05:43):

Exactly right.

Joey (05:45):

We’ve been taught to separate ourselves from that gold in this book was talking about the opposite. It was saying, put our gold in our hands. But then the challenge is, is when you have the gold, what are you going to do with it?

Joey (05:58):

And I love the fact that we, when we were talking earlier, you were talking about the wisdom of reaching out to people who had been there and done that had that experience and then getting the personal experience yourself. We refer to money in this hierarchy of wealth chart. You may have taken a philosophy or a psychology class, with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right? You remember that, that pyramid starting off with the baseline of food and water to shelter, to love and esteem and on the way up to self-actualization? Well, in money there should be that same chart at the baseline. You got cash, you’ve got to have access to it. But then after that, it goes into control and control is the thing that we really love to focus on is because it’s the thing that isn’t in ourself and our mindsets and our knowledge and building networks of people.

Russ (06:46):

And that’s what we love about being on podcasts is that we get to meet and interview new people and learn tons of different things. But once we move up that chart, we should be moving into a collateralized investment. And your audience is so well attuned to invest in real estate because it is a real, tangible asset. For sure. It’s something that, that is creating cashflow, but it’s real. It’s not just fake money that’s been printed out of nowhere. What we see in Wall Street, which is really the top of that pyramid, that’s the speculation. And so often people are taught to go straight to the top and not start at the bottom and move up. And so Joey and I were learning this together. We started then researching together how we were going to create a business. And we broke off from this typical financial planning firm that was doing money management. And we were like, we got to get out of there. We moved on and got into a world to where we started learning personally about how to invest in cash flowing assets and how to get those cash flows to buy new assets and increase our balance sheets by increasing our incomes through cashflow. And it’s been a beautiful thing as we’ve been doing this business and being able to share it on podcasts like yours.

Randy (08:04):

Well, there are so many golden nuggets right there. I mean that you just broke out from your experience. And now you’re sharing with others in your community, as well as on the podcast, like with us here, but just a simple principle of beginning to gain control. See, because again, like what most people are taught is you work and then give the money over to us and we’ll take care of it for you while you work and give us more money. That’s the Wall Street model. No doubt. And no, you don’t need to worry about understanding it or control. We’ll take care of that. And by the way, we’ll take care of you. It’s almost like the new day pension, right. But it’s like better enriching for them in the Wall Street model.

Randy (08:48):

And so for the folks that are listening, you need to be able to gain control, meaning you start to take ownership of your money. And that does require what you just mentioned, an element of learning. And so I appreciate the folks that are listening on the show– you’re taking this time to learn and to grow your understanding or to connect together. And we’ll talk about what you guys need to do to take those additional steps to learn, because now, yes, there’s a little bit of work in that. You got to learn how real estate assets work or how these different type of investments have opportunity for you, but then the benefit of it is far beyond what would maybe just be available, had you not taken that control had you not learned. And so, let’s talk about a little bit more what you guys have done and, and how your business has grown and how does it impact other people? Let’s talk a bit about that.

Russ (09:47):

Yeah, well, we started this podcast, Randy, little over three years ago to do something we felt like was missing in the financial community as a whole, which was regular conversations. And, as an ex advisor, unless the person was sitting in your office are on the phone with you, you really weren’t up to date on what was happening too hard. We have too many people to meet with and we were experienced in the same thing, even though we were not in the typical financial planning space, we still are helping people set up these high cash value life insurance policies that they would go use to go buy real estate or buying businesses or whatever it may be. And they’d want to know about what we were doing personally or what others were doing. And so we thought, man, we’ve got to create a podcast where we can create a weekly conversation and just start sharing those across the table, across the zoom call conversations that we were having daily that were starting to impact the way we were handling our money personally.

Russ (10:44):

But yet it wasn’t trickling down to them because even though we’re not financial planners, they still see us as their financial guy. This is my guy, this is the one that’s going to help me with all those answers. And from there, it, it transitioned the way we do stuff. We went from a local business that met probably 85% of the people face-to-face to now working with people in almost 50 States, all virtually, which has been a blessing, I mean, in this COVID environment. And I can’t even imagine what we would have had without the experience. Had we been where we were three years ago because of that. And that has really changed the entire breadth of our business. Number one, like you said, going from local to national, but also the networks of people that we’ve been able to meet and then subsequently uncover passive income opportunities that we never knew existed.

And subsequently our clients and the folks that are looking to us on our show are now getting to reap the benefits of it, It’s then morphed into, okay, well, we need to take that podcast and all the folks that are listening and bring them into community because ultimately one of the things we know about people that are trying on this journey of building financial freedom is that they’re surrounded a lot of the times by people that are naysayers. And you actually mentioned on the show when we interviewed you, that you had a lot of people that were saying, Randy, you’re a moron, don’t change your job like your business. You can’t give that up, but what did you do? You sought out people that had been there and done that who had the experience, well, guess what you may be in a local place where the people around you have never been there and done that financial freedom. And they’re still going to try to knock you down, like crabs in a barrel. So why not surround yourself with people who are on that path and are going to not necessarily, um, they’re not going to be bringing you down, they’re going to be cheering you on, right? They’re going to be taking the necessary steps to get their cash flows in line. They’re going to be setting up a place where they can use cash to then blow into the next step into passive income. And, and maybe they’re doing land flipping, or maybe they’re doing short-term rentals, or maybe they’re doing syndications or commercial real estate as you guys do a multi-family, but now, people in that arena and you are on your path together.

Randy (13:09):

Oh, for sure. I mean, there’s no doubt. One of the greatest keys of my success has been the power of connecting with other people that have either been a mentor to me directly, or people that are significantly ahead of where I’m at. And they’ve been able to mentor me with wisdom and guidance based on their experience, or also too, being in a community of a mastermind group where it is again, like-minded people that have equal or better experience than me, but everybody is cheering each other on and or you then see, wow, this girl is doing this or this guy’s doing this and it’s inspiring. So no doubt. A lot of times people are conditioned to be the lone ranger. And even the lone ranger had Tonto praise the Lord. And so I think it’s paramount to those of you listening to make sure that yeah, it’s, it’s great to be on the podcast and hearing it, but it’s even better to take a next step and begin to immerse yourself in that type of community or surrounding.

Russ (14:16):

Yeah, no doubt. Well our purpose in our community and our whole process, Randy, I’ll share it is we, we see things very systematically. You mentioned to us earlier that you were a process-oriented guy and that’s the way we think of things as well. It’s just easier to follow something. Now we know that the path to financial freedom is not easy, but there is an easy formula, right? It’s passive income greater than monthly expenses. And you can track that daily.

Russ (14:52):

You literally, right now you can write down how much money do I have coming in that I don’t go to work and maybe its a hundred dollars, maybe $10,000. And then on the right side of the page, you write down what are my average monthly expenses. And you better have a budget because I know Randy’s going to make sure he tells you about that. And that’s one of the first things that we implement in our process as well. So you can take the number on the left and divide it by the number on the right. And it tells you how close are you? What percentage are you toward that end goal to where freedom gives you the option. If you want to keep working, you do it because you love it. Not because you have to. And with, with small kids, I have kids from eight all the way to 15. My two youngest always asked me, daddy, why don’t you go to work? Why can’t you stay home today?

Russ (15:34):

And, and there’s days that I go to work because I want to, but there’s some days I have to go because I have to. And I, and I love the opportunity to be able to teach them that I’m in this process too, I’m on this journey. I’m not a hundred percent there. Part of the reason is, is that I like nice things as well. And those things, have pushed the right side of the page up a little bit. So I’m moving the needle on the left side to catch it.

Randy (16:02):

I would just let me interject too with that too, for the folks that are listening, that’s just gold right there, because you’ve got to control your expenses no matter where you’re at in whatever level they are, you have to do that. You have to be somewhat pragmatic about how you spend money. However, at the same time, there’s nothing wrong with having nice things or increasing your experience in life, because that’s also part of God’s intention for us to grow, right? Because as you’re growing, you’re becoming a change agent, that’s delivering more value to more people, and that’s also enriching you, but it’s enriching them. And so there’s nothing wrong. Sometimes people get on a ramen noodle mindset where it’s like, I’ve always been one focused on increasing the revenue right now. Again, we manage expenses, but I’m not going to scrimp my way to the enjoyment of life. I’m going to increase my revenue. And how do I increase my revenue by delivering more value to more people? That’s the truth. And so, praise God, that’s, that’s an awesome thing.

Joey (17:13):

Yeah, no doubt. And I think, Russ and I actually have been on this journey for quite some time and we’ve made some mistakes along the way. Like we’ve had some challenges. And I think one of those that actually came to fruition this year, or really over the last two years is we started to see that man, we started on this journey of starting a business because we wanted more time, freedom. We wanted more control over, like building something ourselves instead of building for somebody else. Right. And that was, that was coming true. But we were also building a really big job for ourselves, right? I mean, from being a business owner and your business can take over. And so we started to say, wait a minute, one, we need to make our greatest asset, which is our business. That’s the thing we have the most control over work for us, not us work for the business. So we actually hired a consultant to come in. He acted as a COO for us for over a year. He’s actually still part-time with us. And he helped us. He said, he sat us down and he’s like, um, okay, Russ, Joey, what, what do you guys need to make every year? We gave him a number. And he said, well, have you made that much in the business? We’re like, well, yeah. And we actually made more than that. He’s like, well, now the time is not to continue to increase income, but now to start investing in people and in processes to gain more of your time bag, we need to start paring down the time, even as revenues increasing.

Randy (18:46):

I want to stop you right there. That is gold right there. Folks listing here that most people, and this is true. And I’ve been guilty of this too. It’s like, okay, you hit this level and you just keep pushing on. And that’s the moment in time that you take and reinvest into your business to create greater freedom. Because now you’ve already hit this level. Like Joey just said, and now you’re investing into people in processes. So you’re taking that excess money, putting it into the business to create greater leverage for you. So now as you’re growing the business, you’re not growing your time in the business. And that is beautiful right there.

Joey (19:28):

Well, ultimately we have to quit looking at our business as a job, we have to look at it as an asset, the asset that it is, and it can become a passive business for, for most cases, right? I mean, there’s some that you just completely are solo-preneur. You can’t do it, but most cases you can put the things in place to create a passive income stream from a business. And it’s probably your number one possible investment. So we really learned a lot from that and have implemented that and gotten more of our time back. And then secondly, we said, okay, well now if we are able to continue to make more income, which we are, how do we then transition those into passive income that are from these outside sources? So we started with our business and then started transitioning to outside sources. And we had some successes, but we, we started off on the wrong foot with those Russ. Do you want to talk about that? Well, I know that when we were talking earlier, you mentioned investing in things that you’re passionate about. And one of the things that I didn’t realize that I got passionate about a lot of things.

Russ (20:48):

I mean, I’m an excitable guy, let’s do it. I’m sure you you’ve heard of the group, the behavioral test group. And, and we partnered with them about 12 months ago and spent some time working out and building a financial profile. They hadn’t done this before. And they, with our group, built out a financial profile and we refer to it as the investor DNA. And through that process, what I learned about myself is I like to be hands-on. I like to be involved and, and being able to add, I don’t, I don’t mean to involve, I’m not a detail guy, but somebody who can add influence, right. I love to market. I like to talk about things. And so some of the things I’ve been investing in up to that point, I couldn’t add any level of value to it.

Russ (21:37):

And for me, that was not really exciting because then my goal is to be able to share and to do and to connect. And so, I would look at what I was investing in and the things that I could do, those things, they had, the highest returns, the things that I weren’t didn’t, and maybe I chose the bad ones over here and it could have happened to be the other way. But that was for us is like looking and matching up our investor DNA and the things that we were excited about and the things that, the results of those things, what they were doing were, were playing off. So one of the things that I love is that we’ve gotten involved into a short term rentals, and I love this because my family is, a family of six who likes to travel.

Russ (22:23):

We don’t go to any hotel room and fit easy. Right. And then there’s not a lot of times where we have the hotel room where they have the connecting door in the middle. Because my wife’s always worried about that. What if someone opened the door on the other end, somebody could come in and what if we didn’t hear? And so we started renting houses and renting places through sites like Airbnb or whatever, Joey, and what are one of these things that we could get involved in? I said, what about that? Like our families use these. It’s something that we can resonate with. Other families, other traveling business people when they go places, they, they don’t want to stay in these high and tight hotels anymore, especially with all the COVID and stuff. And we started getting involved in that and then we started sharing it, right. We, we, we hired an operator because I don’t want to do the business by the way, but I want to own the business and I want to be involved. And that was one of the things that we saw, like having human, a humongous success and really filled me up and was matching my personality.

Randy (23:28):

Well, I’ll just comment on that to unpack that a bit. As you transition or move into this investment arena, you’ve got to understand it. Right. So I love the fact that it’s like, Hey, I’ve been in an Airbnb. I understood the model. It made sense to me. Sometimes people get lured by their passion or like this flashy thing, right. Like, Oh, I’m going to get in, Oh, I heard I could get into this factoring of receivables and it’s paying 23%. And it’s like, well, what, what is that? And they’re like, I don’t know what it is, but it sounds really good at factoring receivables. And it’s like, well, you realize that you don’t have any security when that business blows up. That’s the first thing to go.

Randy (24:11):

Are there unsecured receivables? And you just lost all your money. And it’s like, well, no, I didn’t even understand it. And it’s like, that’s exactly my point. And so when you’re taking that step in that you understand what it is that you’re doing, whether it’s apartments. I mean, again, it’s pretty straightforward. We’re providing affordable housing for people to live or a storage facility where they can store their stuff or like an Airbnb. So those are critical things. And then I think too, being true to yourself, right? Like, Hey, I don’t want to just be completely passive. I’d like to have some influence, but I also don’t want to get a call about a tenant and the toilet, you know what I mean? And so that’s the thing, I see people where they come to us after, like they’ve just run headlong into something where they, , got six, seven, eight rentals. And after about a year and a half, they’re like, good, God, this is terrible. Right? Like, because they didn’t realize that they’re going to deal with some of these problems they’re dealing with.

Russ (25:09):

Well, and I think that there’s some people that are so detail oriented, they love doing the research. And then they find asset classes that match up with that, where they can go research the operator of the multi-family property they’re investing in and they know all the questions to ask and they know exactly the demographics that they’re going into and they go, yes, this is what I want. Well, that’s not what just perfect. That’s not me. Right. So I’ve invested in some multi-family deals where I connected with the person who was the operator. He and I were very similar, which by the way, is a bad thing because I’m not a detail-oriented person. I had to learn that about myself afterwards. So shocking. Some of those deals I got involved in, they had some hiccups, they had some that they didn’t realize because that person had similar traits as I do.

Russ (25:59):

So this is where I start thinking. I’m like, well, Joey and I are really growing this short-term rental thing. And one of the areas that I want to ask you, the question have as an operator and owner of multifamily and lots of apartment complexes across the country, I’m interested in us acquiring or partnering with someone to buy a 25 to 50 unit apartment complex. And then instead of having long-term rentals in there, us renting those out as the long-term renter, but us using that for short term rental. But what would be, if you were partnering with someone like us, what would be a question that you would want to have answered before? You’d say that’d be a deal for me to get involved?

Randy (26:44):

I mean, I think it would be definitely location, what’s the attraction factor for the short-term rental. Then I think size would be a critical component, because again, I think you get too big, it starts to feel like a hotel. Exactly. And, the third would be, what’s the consistent draw for the area now, whether it’s a leisure draw or whether it’s an employment based draw, like, I have friend of mine that contracted with a hospital to provide short term housing like that for incoming contract nurses. Great business, no doubt. Um, but then also, they’re just understanding some of those dynamics to it.

Russ (27:34):

Yeah. I mean, we we’ve been right now, we’ve got 10 units in an apartment complex and it’s one of it. It kinda sparked that interest in us. We’ll sure. Yeah. It needs to be small. It doesn’t need to be a couple hundred unit facility, but it is that, one of the beauties of multifamily, right, is that you’re under one roof because when you go get, 20 different units that are, has 20 different routes, 20 different air conditioning, all that stuff could be different, the headaches, that’s the beauty of apartments. And so we’re thinking like, how can we combine the consistency of the long-term rental because you have a long-term rent or which is the business of the short-term rental business, but then the cash flows of the short term rental. Because the first one we did was we actually took a unit that Joey had been long-term renting for about the last 12, 13, 12, 15 years. And we immediately tripled its monthly income. Wow. It was crazy. And it was one, we were like, well, who’s going to, who’s coming to Birmingham. We’re in Birmingham, Alabama. Like wait, you’re not coming here for leisure. There’s no one to hold up. I mean, people come into town and they’re like, what do I go see? I don’t know. I mean, what are you going to do?

Russ (28:53):

But it’s surprising as we start asking our operator, there’s lots of different things people are in town for. And we get a lot of business travel, a lot of medical travel, but we get people traveling for ball games and for weddings and funerals. And people stay in hotels–if there’s hotels in your city, you have an opportunity. I’m trying to think of like, how do we mess these two together? Because I love the apartment model. I love that concept. And I want to, as if we can combine something else that we’re passionate with, with that.

Randy (29:28):

Well, and I think even too with that, I mean, if you’re looking at purchasing them outright, that smaller complex could be married together where you’ve got some long-term, but predominantly be rentals. There’s definitely an opportunity there. Or then it may even be leasing and then subleasing within, with a master community where again, knowing that, Hey, we’re connecting together with this operator and we’re going to rent 10 apartments within this community. And then our intention is to then, re-rent them out on the short-term rental basis. So we’ve got a couple of different ways maybe to approach that. But, I think for sure, it’s good. And I think even out of that conversation, it goes back to what is right for you.

Randy (30:20):

And I’d say that to the listeners. It’s like, so clearly you guys have an aptitude to desire in that arena. That’s something you feel good about, passionate about and successful with. And it’s like, that’s a good fit for you. Now. It may not be a good fit for somebody else or somebody else says, Hey, I want to be in single family homes, but it’s like, the key is doing what is the right connection? Because there’s a ton of different ways to go about making money in real estate and or passively. So praise the Lord. That’s an awesome example. And it’s a successful example.

Russ (30:56):

Well, and don’t be misled, Randy. You are a coach, you are a guide in this process of financial freedom and for everything that we’ve done, we’ve learned the hard way you have to have that guide in that coach. So when we talk about short term rentals, that wasn’t something that like resonated, stayed in one and then turned out the next day and we’re like, Hey, we need to go into business. Like, like this is, we, we know exactly what we’re doing. We had to hire that coach. We had to hire an operator and those things cost money, but we’ve learned that you’re going to pay either on the front end to learn from someone else’s mistakes or you’re going to pay probably two, three, four times in your own mistakes. And so anyways, I just want to point that out, like man, having you as a guide for the folks listening and for us, our community has been that place where we’re gathering those coaches and experts so that we can learn from the folks that are involved in our community can too, by the way, is it okay if we provide help?

Randy (32:01):

For sure–a hundred percent. Yeah, absolutely. I want to, for the folks that are listening and again, I’d say absolutely to connect together, to learn more about the community, how can they connect together with it? Because I know you guys have a basic financial education course in there that’s free, as well as other resources that can help people on the journey. So how do they connect together?

Russ (32:23):

Yeah. We’re gonna set up a specific site for you guys to go to– it’s wealthwithoutwallstreet.com/realestatepreacher. You can go there and get free access, and start connecting with others and learning along the way with them. So in that, Randy, when someone joins there, they’re going to see that we have a four-step process. The first step we’ve been talking a little bit about, this is clarity, knowing what you want, why you want it, maybe challenging some of the belief systems that you have and making sure what you believe is actually true, or was it just given to you and you’ve accepted it as true. And then secondly, we take people through a process to help them gain control. And it goes back to budgeting. It goes back to where you’re storing cash. It challenges where your cash flows are going. The third step is helping them set. The course, they go through that investor DNA profile. They understand a little more about themselves. We give them exposure to all different types of ideas that we’ve been interviewing over 150 entrepreneurs, people in different spaces, who’ve created passive income and so many different ways.

Joey/Russ (33:37):

It’s crazy to think how many different ways people can make money, but by giving the exposure, understanding who you are, it allows them to start going down and narrowing those two down to maybe one or two, and then they can go and go through Q and A’s. They can go through podcasts and then be able to make that decision. So hopefully through that process, they start the whole time they should be tracking. Are they getting closer to the financial freedom by using that scorecard? We talked about a second ago and then the fourth one is really something fun that we love to talk about is really cherishing what they’ve received, because for some people they get there and they don’t even know how to spend the money at that point, right there. Maybe they did a budget, but then they go, well, just because I have money.

Joey/Russ (34:20):

I know you mentioned before that you drive a really nice sports car…and what I’ve found is that sometimes when people reach freedom, they don’t, they start feeling guilty. If they cannot buy this thing, or can I buy the second home? Is that, is that a good thing for my money? And we want to break out not only how those things should operate, but also looking at them from a financial perspective, because we have a thing that we’ve done and we show people the difference between a 401k and a 401 Lake house. And we literally share out the math on that and the tax implications of that and the results of that. And it’s a blessing for those people who are in a position to know if I have the cashflow, how would this work? And then ultimately, and you said this to us before as well, is that, how can we leave an inheritance to our children’s children? We want to talk about legacy and the not passing down money, but also being able to pass down the knowledge of how that money was created and values of what our family believes so that the next generations can continue to, to have that some somewhat similar to the Rockefeller family, as opposed to another prominent family like the Vanderbilt. So, we’re super successful for a short period of time. And then all of a sudden, the money’s depleted in a very short period of time as well.

Randy (35:43):

Well again, for the folks that are listening and they want to connect together, those are fabulous steps. And again, I would just say this–there’s also no wealth without work, right? So somebody thinking, Hey, that sounds like a little bit of work. Look, you’ve got to put a little bit of effort in to be able to gain control. So just like you were saying, the sum of these steps it’s causing you to have to think it’s causing you to have to put in a little bit of effort to figure out where is my budget, figure out where’s my temperament. These are all things that are critical folks, because you have to understand who you are, how you operate, what are the steps to take and then to be around other people that can help you take those steps. So again, let’s share the URL with everybody who is listening so that they can click on there and, and log in and check it out.

It’s wealthwithoutwallstreet.com/realestatepreacher.

Randy (36:36):

All right. Very good. Well, let’s do this. Let’s close out here with just a couple of quick questions. What would you say has been the biggest challenge that you’ve been through and what did you learn from it?

Russ (36:47):

Well, I’m going to jump in here and Joey’s talked briefly about this, but it was moving from like Robert Kiyosaki talks about in the cashflow quadrant, moving from an employee to an S quadrant, business owner self-employed and then the hardest challenge has been moving out of that S quadrant to, a B quadrant business owner into an investor. And what I learned from that is that we have to have processes and people in place. And just because I’m good at it doesn’t mean I need to do it. And, and being able to back away and not always want to save a dollar or save time of telling someone to do something and trying to jump in there and do it myself, is being able to hand that off. And the blessing behind that is the fact that we’ve been able to see more time with our family, more time doing the things that I feel like I might actually be gifted at, and that I really enjoy. And it’s not building websites is creating copy, emails or something.

Randy (37:50):

For sure. For sure. What would you say has been the number one thing that you’ve learned this year and then what was the trigger for it?

Russ (38:00):

I think to go along with that biggest challenge, what we’ve learned in it’s been really over the last 18 months, maybe that I mentioned earlier is that once we got it clear that our time was slipping away and for the reasons that we started a business, we’re going the opposite direction. We got really clear. We said, well, wait a minute, we need more time. How does that happen? Well, we have to leverage our business and we have to leverage outside passive income sources.

Russ (38:36):

And so once we really started making that commitment, we started making decisions along the way, like I said, to make the business more passive. And then secondly, we got really serious about putting some significant cash behind some of these passive income ideas and saying, we’ve got to do this. It’s not a matter of, we’ll get to it someday. If we don’t start doing it now, we’re going to miss my almost two year old is going to be changing so much over the next two to three years. I don’t have time to miss that. Right. So I want to start doing the things like he said, his daughter’s driving now, or how much more time does he have with her? It’s very limited. My marriage, I want my marriage to be something that is life-giving to us and to others. Why can’t do that if I’m just always on fumes. Right. So passive income became very important. And so we really have put a bunch of resources behind it. And this year we’ve combined now we’ve, we’ve created over $6,000 a month in terms of free cashflow from our passive income ideas. And we’re just getting started.

Randy (39:49):

That’s awesome. Well, I want to just highlight that this should be a must. I must do this and it’s got to happen now and I’m going to take action. And so that is so powerful for you who are listening because a lot of times people will listen. And then bam, within short order, that must, that took action translated into results. And that’s really how it works. So, yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Very good. Well guys, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing with our audience. And again, I want to invite you to go check out wealthwithoutwallstreet.com/realestatepreacher. And again, guys, thank you so much for sharing with us and sharing your journey and having such a heart and a desire to want to be a blessing to other folks and help them on their journey as well. And for you guys who are here, listening on the show today, want to thank you for tuning in, have a blessed and victorious week four. This is the week God has ordained for you.