Wealth Formula Podcast

Robert Kiyosaki once wrote a book called Why "A" Students Work for "C" Students and Why "B" Students Work for the Government. I remember talking to him about this years ago and telling him that I thought the explanation was pretty simple. The C students had nothing to lose, so they took all the chances. The A students, on the other hand, had been programmed to respond to success like Pavlovian dog...

There's something fascinating about real estate cycles. In 2009, Las Vegas was practically synonymous with financial disaster. Home prices had collapsed, foreclosures were everywhere, and plenty of people thought the market might never recover. Phoenix wasn't much better. Florida had entire neighborhoods filled with vacant homes. Investors were running for the exits. Fast forward a decade, and som...

America has a housing shortage. You've heard it in practically every real estate investment pitch. We haven't built enough homes. People need somewhere to live. Therefore, owning apartments should be a pretty good business. So why have apartment owners in some of the fastest-growing markets offered free rent just to get people through the door the last few years? Because a national housing shortag...

If you want to know what happened to Dallas real estate, look at interest rates and the wave of new apartment construction. If you want to understand where it could be headed over the next few years, look at the people. Dallas–Fort Worth's population grew by more than 123,000 in just 12 months. Compare that with the roughly 33,000 new apartments completed in 2025. That's about four additional peop...

Imagine telling a farmer 200 years ago that someday, people would make a living helping businesses get found on Google. First, you'd have to explain Google, then the internet, then computers. And yet, when we talk about AI, we tend to assume we can already see all the jobs that will ever exist. We look at what people do today, consider what AI might replace, and start subtracting. The concern is r...

When you finally start making some real money, you don't necessarily realize what that really means. In a way, you've just started another business. Think about it. The money you've earned and saved now has a job. Its job is to make more money. That makes you the CEO of the business of your own money. Now imagine you started a business with a few million dollars of your hard-earned capital. Would...

AI may ultimately change the world. It may also be covering up how weak much of the current economy really is. Both things can be true. We keep asking whether "the economy" is strong or headed toward recession—as if every part of it moves together. But what if significant parts of the economy are already contracting while an extraordinary spending boom in one narrow area makes the overall numbers...

That's a question I get a lot from investors, and the answer isn't as simple as the math might suggest. For years, the calculation was pretty easy. When mortgage rates were extremely low, borrowing money was cheap compared with the returns you could reasonably expect from investing that capital elsewhere. Even today, with mortgage rates above 6%, you can still make a mathematical argument for keep...

Whether or not you currently invest in real estate, you've probably heard people talk about the enormous tax advantages that come with it. You hear about people like Donald Trump paying no taxes. You hear people complain that wealthy real estate investors somehow play by a different set of rules. Well, actually they do. But what exactly are they doing? A huge part of the answer comes down to one s...

Every once in a while, it's useful to zoom way out. Most of the time, we look at the economy as a collection of separate stories. The federal government is running enormous deficits. Stock market valuations are near historic extremes. China has emerged as America's greatest strategic competitor. Defense spending is ramping up. And hundreds of billions of dollars are pouring into artificial intelli...

Why is housing so expensive in some American cities—and why does it seem like we can never build enough of it? We tend to blame everything from interest rates and developers to investors and population growth. But a big part of the answer may be much simpler: in many of the places where people most want to live, we've made it extraordinarily difficult to build more housing. My guest on this week's...

For the last three years, commercial real estate investors have been waiting for a dramatic reset. The expectation was straightforward: higher interest rates, a wall of maturing loans, and distressed sellers would eventually force prices sharply lower, with the correction happening all at once. Instead, the great real estate reset is happening—but it's happening in slow motion. Today, we're seeing...

Link to Harry Moser's Resources blog: https://reshorenow.org/blog/reshoring-initiative-resources/ For decades, one of the easiest ways to increase profits was to manufacture products where labor was cheapest. Companies built factories in China, Southeast Asia, and Mexico, while consumers enjoyed lower prices and shareholders benefited from higher margins. It became conventional wisdom that globali...

Most investors spend nearly all their time thinking about how to make money. They analyze returns, evaluate risk, search for opportunities, and try to identify the next great investment. But there is another side of wealth building that receives far less attention: How much of what you make do you actually get to keep—and continue compounding? Taxes on investment gains can be one of the most destr...

One of the biggest mistakes investors make is assuming that today's conditions will last forever. When the stock market is soaring, they assume it will continue indefinitely. When it's crashing, they assume the pain has only just begun. Real estate investors aren't any different. Today, there are plenty of headlines about falling apartment values, weak rent growth, and rising vacancies. Many inves...

One of the first lessons you learn as an investor is that the headline is rarely the whole story. The same is often true in history. Take the so-called "October Surprise" of 1980. The theory—which remains debated today—is that members of Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign may have secretly encouraged Iran to delay the release of 52 American hostages until after the election, denying President J...

Most investors spend an enormous amount of time thinking about interest rates, inflation, earnings, and the latest AI breakthroughs. But very few stop to think about the one input that makes all of those things possible in the first place: energy. We tend to assume that energy will always be there when we need it—that supply will simply keep growing as demand increases. History makes it feel inevi...

One of the biggest frustrations I hear from successful professionals, business owners, and investors is simple: "I feel like I'm paying more and more in taxes, but nobody is showing me legitimate ways to reduce them." The reality is that there are numerous tax strategies available to high earners. The challenge is separating strategies grounded in well-established tax principles from those that re...

For most high-income professionals, the path to financial success seems straightforward: work hard, earn a great income, save diligently, and invest wisely. The problem is that even the highest-paying jobs have two significant limitations. First, much of what you earn is exposed to taxation. While there are certainly strategies to reduce your tax burden, there is a reason many of the wealthiest pe...

For those of us with kids, summer marks another milestone. School is out, graduation season is here, and for many families, college is right around the corner. My oldest daughter will be a senior this fall, which means our family is now officially entering the college application process. Like many parents, I've been looking at tuition numbers and mentally preparing myself for what feels like an i...

Some of the best real estate investments in history were made when the headlines were overwhelmingly negative. When financing dries up, lenders become restrictive, sellers become motivated, and uncertainty keeps many investors on the sidelines, opportunities begin to emerge for those willing to look beyond today's fear. That is precisely where we find ourselves today. Commercial real estate has en...

A couple of weeks ago, I had Barry Habib on the podcast talking about where he believes interest rates and the economy may be headed over the next several years. Barry has been one of the more accurate voices in housing and mortgage finance during a period when many economists and market commentators have repeatedly gotten it wrong. This week, I wanted to continue that discussion with mortgage ind...

This week's episode of Wealth Formula Podcast is a little different. What you're about to hear is actually a webinar I recently did with Chris Miles on a topic I've discussed on and off over the years called Wealth Formula Banking. Why play this on the podcast? Because I genuinely think more people need to understand the concept. It may or may not ultimately be right for you, but I think it's wort...

The stock market is sitting at or near all-time highs again. And what happens? People rush in. It's called FEAR OF MISSING OUT. Now compare that to what's happening in real estate. In many markets—especially multifamily—we've seen 30–40% price corrections from just 3–4 years ago. Our investor club has been buying, but most investors are sitting on the sidelines. Why? Because investments are the on...

I continue to be surprised by how many sophisticated investors still dismiss Bitcoin as purely speculative. At this point, whether you personally like Bitcoin or not is almost beside the point. The more important question is this: What happens to the price of an asset with a permanently fixed supply when institutional adoption accelerates globally? Because that is exactly what is happening right n...