Wealth Formula Podcast

The two most powerful motivations for behavior are fear and greed. If you haven't thought about that before paying attention to the kinds of messaging you hear especially in the alternative asset podcast ecosystem? At the risk of offending gold bugs, how many times have you heard someone who sells precious metals on a podcast talking about the demise of the United States and the inevitability of t...

The challenge with investing is that you can do everything right and still lose. Unfortunately its supposed to be that way otherwise everyone would take the biggest bets possible all the time and always win. That's just not reality. In good times, it is very hard to anticipate what could happen if the unexpected occurs. Over the last 24 months, we saw interest rates rise at a slope never before se...

My social life sucks. I moved to Montecito in 2017 from Chicago a married man with 3 children. When we got here, I didn't know anyone. Luckily, I had my family and was plenty entertained by my three little girls. My now ex-wife also served as social coordinator to make sure we had things to do. Then with beginning of Covid, my marriage came to an end. Since moving to Montecito, I had been working...

As you may know, I have three daughters aged 14,11 and 8. The oldest, Camilla, is now in high school. For those of you who have been listening for me for a while, yes, that was the little girl who did an introduction for episode 100. We are all getting older by the minute. Anyway, recalling that it was at around her age that I began to think about the world in a greater context than simply ice hoc...

For those of you who have participated in our self-storage offerings in the past with Reliant Real Estate, you know that you can make a lot of money in this space. One of our deals, while not planned this way, nearly doubled investor equity in less than a year. Those kinds of returns are sexy but self storage itself is NOT sexy at all. It's just where people keep there stuff when there's no room f...

Wealth Formula Nation, Happy New Year! I have a feeling that 2024 is going to be a good year for us. I think we are going to pick up quality assets at a discount like it's 2012 and liquidity will come back to the real estate markets. I'm also eager to develop our own investor platform into a more diverse investment source. Real estate will always be our bread and butter but there will also be othe...

When I first started podcasting a decade ago, I was very anti-Wall Street. But what does that even mean? I guess I hadn't really contemplated that. My show started not long after the financial meltdown of 2008-2009. For many of us, the greed that was unveiled during that period was eye-opening as we saw major institutions fold losing ordinary people their life savings yet the architects of the dis...

During college, I spent a summer working in a laboratory at the University of Chicago where my biochemistry mentor did his PhD. The lab studied prostate cancer and was the legacy of Charlie Huggins, a surgeon who won the Nobel prize for discovering the testosterone dependence of most prostate cancers. The guy who took over that lab was his protege Shutsung Liao who did some trailblazing work of hi...

In this bonus episode of Wealth Formula Podcast, Jorge Newberry shares with us some background on what's been happening with AHP as well as his perspective on real estate and the debt market.

You know what drives me crazy? Politicians talking about how rich Americans need to start paying their "fair share". First of all, they aren't really taking about the rich. They are talking about you—the high paid professional. To be clear, if you are making $400K-$800K per year as a W2 wager earner, you're doing well for sure. But you aren't rich. Yet, you are the one that gets vilified and gets...

As the end of the year approaches, many of us are thinking about ways to mitigate our tax liability for 2023. Unfortunately, this year there is not a whole lot in terms of options. The IRS has clamped down on syndicated conservation easements and anything resembling it. If you are being talked into something like that, I would suggest you be very careful. Anyone selling them at this point is not l...

A lot has happened over the past year in real estate. It goes to show how quickly things can change. Unless you have been living in a cave, you know that interest rates went way up really quickly. When that happens, housing typically goes down in value significantly. Oddly enough, in much of the country, that wasn't quite the case. Why? Well, there wasn't much inventory. Record LOW rates created b...

When I moved to Montecito a few years ago, I was amazed at how many people didn't seem to work. To be clear, we don't have a homeless problem out here. We just have a lot of people who own businesses. And it's not quite true that they don't work. They just don't have regular hours so there's a disproportionate number of people hanging out during the day. Of course, I myself am a business owner and...

It's NFL season and I'm still glued to the TV despite my team's rough start and the fact that we lost our starting quarterback for the year. In case you don't know, my team is the Minnesota Vikings and our starting quarterback was Kirk Cousins who just went down with a brutal Achilles tendon tear. Kirk makes a lot of money—$30 million in 2023. Of course, when we think of professional athletes, we...

The world of real estate is kind of a cult. Members of this cult tend to think that pretty much anything outside of real estate is just a waste of money. I used to subscribe to this religion. And, for the most part, I still kind of do. My portfolio is largely real estate and I truly believe it is the most tax-efficient consistent way of building wealth out there. But it's not the only way. I've ma...

No one getting married thinks that they will ever get divorced. I can tell you that from personal experience. Yet over half of American marriages end up in divorce. I was lucky in that I had an amicable break-up. Most of the divorces I've seen in the past few years have been ugly. I have two friends finally get through divorces in the last two years. In both situations, the men originally offered...

The financial meltdown of 2008-2009 feels like ancient history. And like tragedies that happened long ago, it feel more historical and less emotional. I remember going to Pompeii several years ago and seeing people turned to stone from Mount Vesuvius erupting. It must have been horrific. But time has made it more of a museum than the scene of an awful natural disaster. That's the way most people l...

I'm not a doom and gloom podcaster as a general rule. There are plenty of those out there predicting the zombie apocalypse. However, I have to say that I'm pretty sure I've been seeing some questionable zombiesque characters running around town lately. It has occurred to me, however, that most people are not seeing what I am seeing. After all, the job markets are humming along just great and infla...

My portfolio is not what most would call diversified. I am about 70-80 percent real estate, 10-15 percent permanent life insurance and about 10-15 percent higher risk stuff. My only stock exposure is only high-risk stuff like mining companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange. To be clear, I am not advocating for this approach. That's just what has worked for me up to this point in my life. I should a...

Last week I talked about asymmetric investing and gave you an example of one of my own higher risk bets—Hedera with its HBAR Token. Right now, that cryptocurrency market is still sleepy. So, if you are motivated to do so, you could easily find a few tokens that are 10 percent or less of what they cost in the frothy market of two years ago and grab them. Of course, you would want to make sure those...

Last week I did a back-to-school episode for you on asymmetric risk. I told you that my primary asymmetric risk related investments are in cryptocurrency. As a reminder, asymmetric risk investing means you throw in some money that, if you lose it, isn't going to kill you. But on the other hand, if things go well, could make you rich. Cryptocurrency has done both for a lot of people. In fact, in ma...

So far in our back-to-school series, we have covered asset protection, estate planning and my capital allocation strategy. Wouldn't it be great if you could hit all these important concepts with a single investment? Well, as it turns out, you sort of can. Let me back up and tell you a story. When I was fresh out of surgical residency and started to make some money, I started looking for advice on...

Asset Allocation Diversification and Leverage Permanent Life Insurance and the Wealth Accelerator Multi-Family Real Estate Asymmetric Investing: Taking a Risk How to Avoid Single-Point of Failure?