I Wouldn’t Retire Until I Understood THIS

You've probably heard that Bitcoiners say never sell your Bitcoin. But of course, that raises a very obvious question: like, how do you retire and pay your expenses without selling? And more importantly, when you ask that question, it exposes a much bigger problem. One that explains why nearly half of boomers today can't afford to retire. And it's not because they picked the wrong investments. It's because the retirement model they were taught, or their advisers use, is fatally flawed. So, in this video, I'm going to show you why your retirement plan is broken and how, using Bitcoin or any other asset, you can fix it. And even better, you could reach your goals in a fraction of the time. You ready? Let's go.

All right, we're going to shift the entire way that you're thinking about this so you can achieve your goals in a fraction of the time, while most people actually never even achieve them. Now, trying to understand your retirement and how much money you need and what assets to invest in, it's sort of like a puzzle. It's not just really a puzzle. It's actually a math problem. I'm going to break down the math for you. But the problem is that most people think retirement is some like, uh, pre-programmed track that I get good grades, I get a good job, I save for 30 or 40 years, and then I end up to at this point where I could stop and I could live off of my income. But the problem is twofold. The data shows us this. Number one, merely half of baby boomers today have no savings. So, this pre-programmed track that people are going on, it doesn't work. It hasn't worked. Half of people have no savings. That's pretty bad. But it also fails for other reasons. And I'm going to show you why it's fatally flawed. But let's just look at the data here again real quick, because it gets even worse. We can see that of the half that actually do have some money, the median savings of these boomers is about $200,000. And it gets even worse. The fatal flaw of traditional retirement planning tells us that based on the 4% rule, the 4% rule means that I'm able to sell 4% of my assets every year to live, and I'm going to break the math for you. But based off of that, on the $200,000 of median savings of the half that even have it, that retirement income would be about $8,000 per year. But of course, it takes a lot more than $8,000 per year to live today. On average, it says here, US households between the ages of 55 and 64 spend over $78,000. Not $8,000, $78,000. Now, this has another flaw, which typically your adviser will tell you that when you retire, you'll spend less money. That sounds pretty bad. When I retire, I want to go enjoy myself. I want to go travel around the world. I want to take my wife all over the place. And I probably want to spend more money than I do right now, not less. Don't worry, we're going to get to all that. But retirement planning fails for one reason. And it's not they didn't save enough. It's not the wrong assets. It's not because of the 4%. Those are all part of it. It's the selling. It's not the timing. That's part of it. It's not the assets. That's part of it. I'm going to show you all that. But it's the selling. You see, they're going to sell down their assets at 4% a year. And I'm going to show you why this is flawed. But then the hope is that I guess I hope I die before I hit zero. What if I don't? Well, let me show you a better way to think about this.

Okay. So, there's a default model that most people are on. Again, as I already told you, right? I'm going to work for 40 years and I'm going to hopefully put, you know, 5 or 10% away a year. I'm going to save that money. It's going to go into a 401k, Roth IRA, my house, whatever. And then hopefully one day I can live under the sun on a beach chair and do nothing all day, drink my ties, and I can retire. And then again, the fatal flaw is that I'm going to sell off my assets a little bit, little by little by little, and then hopefully I don't run out before I die. But just think about the math. I mean, think about how could you save 10% a year for 30 or 40 years and then live on a 100% income for 30 years? Like, obviously that doesn't work. So it's built also on assumption. So, for example, it assumes that markets continue to stay stable. But if you've been alive for longer than a couple of weeks, you know that's not the case. Number two, it relies on predictable returns. And again, that is not accurate as well. Let me show you a couple things. Let me show you some default math. Let me run you through some examples.

Okay, so the default retirement model, uh, not 200,000. Uh, let's let's go to a million. Now, if you have $100,000, you can adjust that. If you have $10 million, you can adjust that as well. I like to use round numbers. Now, it gets a little bit worse here because what we can see is that the average person that's using a plan advisor, they're going into something called a 60/40 portfolio, index funds, equities, and bonds. Now, I'm going to use an 8% number, but really that number is about 6% to 8%. But the reality check is that the cost of living is going up by about 10%. Not 6%, 7%, not 8%, 10%. So even if I'm making the 8%, I'm actually losing money every single year. I'm not making money. My purchasing power is going down. Sure, my account statement looks like I made money, but my purchasing power is going down. So the net reality is that my portfolio grows at minus 2% real rates per year. And that's even before I start withdrawing the money. That's just as it's saving and growing, I'm losing 2%. Let me show you what I'm actually talking about so you're not just listening to me. I'll give you the receipts here. So, this is from 2005 to 2025, a 20-year time span. We can see the S&P 500 did about 10 to 11%. That's great. So, if all I did was put it into an index fund, the S&P 500, I kept up about what the rate of cost of living going up. I stayed about even. But if I do what my advisor tells me, what almost everybody in America that uses an advisor is in is some sort of like a 60/40 portfolio, that did about six and a half to 7%, meaning I'm losing about 3% per year in that. And if I use like Ray Dalio's all-weather type portfolio, so a lot of advisors would put you in something like this, meaning diversify across a broad basket like Ray Dalio, you only did 5.5 to 6% over the last 20 years, which means you're losing about 5% of your portfolio per year, negative compounding, and that's even before I start withdrawing. That's a big problem.

Now, we also have the income gap problem. Again, uh, you don't need $8,000 a year to live. I don't know if you can live on $78,000. I'm thinking maybe, I don't know, $120,000. You figure out what that number is for you. But on this hypothetical number of a million dollars, if I'm using the 4% safe withdrawal number, that'd be $40,000. Again, that's still not enough. Not for me. What I think actual living needs are going to be closer to $120,000, which means it's not 4% I need to withdraw. I need to withdraw 12% annually. All right, that's the reality for most people. But this model breaks even before the market volatility kicks in. Even before my lifestyle costs continue to rise, we're not even putting those in right now. I'm going to keep this pretty simple for you. But let me show you what this sort of looks like. So, if I'm doing this in a traditional retirement plan, and then I'm going to show you a better one. Don't worry. Um, in a good market, I started with a million dollars. I got 8% growth. Okay, good job. Now, that's assuming I didn't listen to my advisor. I didn't do a Ray Dalio portfolio. I didn't do a traditional 60/40 portfolio. This is like all index funds. So, I grew a little bit, but then I needed $120,000 withdrawal. So, I end up with $960,000 per year. That's in a good year. That's the problem. That's in a good year. This is like a best-case scenario. And so, what happens is, um, Einstein called compounding interest the eighth wonder of the world. Those who know it earn it. Those who don't know it pay it. So, there's no neutral here. I'm either growing or I'm shrinking. And we can see exactly what this looks like. The compounding problem. If I'm holding my assets, they're compounding over time. But if I continue to sell them over time, withdrawing that 4% or in this case 12%, my portfolio is going down to zero. And again, it's a race against the clock trying to, you know, I hate to say die before I run out of zero.

Now, what happens during a bad year? That was in a good year. What about a bad year? What if we had like a 20% market drop like we see happen all the time? It happened in 2025. It happened in 2020. It happened, right? We see it over and over. Well, now I see a big drop. See, a 20% market drop. And I go, uh, I entered at $800,000. Now my portfolio is down to $640,000, but my cost of living didn't drop. I still need the $100 or the $120, which then means I'm taking it all the way down to $520,000. A 35% drawdown in one single year. That's the problem.

Okay, don't worry. There's some fixes to this. I'm going to show you what this looks like. Okay. Now, what we want to do is we want to shift our mindset from being a consumer and thinking about selling and consumption to being an owner. Okay? It's a big shift. It's a mental shift we can all make. An owner thinks about their wealth continuing to grow for long periods of time. Like a business, it just creates value. I own a home. Over a long period of time, the home's worth more money. So, I want to think about wealth over a long period of time continuing to grow. I want to think about growing those assets forever and then using the growth from those assets to fund my life. Not to consume them, but to allow them to continue to grow over a long period of time. Selling would then only be optional and that would only be sort of if I wanted to get rid of one asset to buy another asset, for example, and then I can optimize for my time in my life. So now I can live the lifestyle that I want and I could live as long as I want and I could give this system to my heirs and they could reap the benefits of this system. But a consumer mindset is that the wealth only diminishes. So what I just showed you, right? I'm selling off 4% a year and it's dwindling down and bad markets, it goes down even faster and then maybe it's zero. It's diminishing the whole time. Selling assets, I have to sell them to pay for my bills to fund my lifestyle. I have to sell everything off. I'm consuming those assets. Selling becomes mandatory. I have to sell if I want to pay my bills. And now time and price are the dominant risk. It's a big problem. But there's three bigger costs that most people don't understand about this. Let me show you what they are.

Here's the real hidden cost of selling. Number one, the compounding stops. Remember, compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. And so, the asset is doubling. It's compounding on the compounding on the compounding. So, the way it works, you could take a number, say if I'm making a 10% return, I divide it by 72 and that would give me how long it takes to double. So, say at 10%, it's every seven years. So it goes from, you know, 1 million to 2 million to 4 million to 8 million to 16 million. Those doubles get really big towards the end. But if I sell the asset, I compound the compounding stops. I lock it in. It never grows anymore. Number two, then I have massive tax drag. So on top of it, not only have I stopped the compounding, all that future growth potential is gone. On top of it, now I got to give 20 to 50% away to the government. And that's less capital to compound. I don't get to spend it. It doesn't get to compound. It goes to the government. Number three, I lose opportunity cost. So, I miss the asymmetric upside that I have and all the other opportunities I could have by using that asset as collateral to get me more assets to increase my lifestyle. So, we lose it in three ways. If if if I want to quantify it just a little bit on that hypothetical number I was showing you, we can see that over 20 years, I'm going to lose over $200,000 just to cap gains alone. Money that could be compounding and instead is now lost forever.

Okay, now I know that sounds terrible, right? Sounds horrible. So what's the solution? Well, we got plan B. Let me show you plan B and let me run you through some other numbers. Now, real quickly, let me just state for the record here. You should already know this. This is not financial advice. I'm not your financial advisor. I don't know you. I haven't gone through any of your numbers. So, this is for educational purposes only. Okay? I'm using very big, very broad numbers. Feel free to adjust these and dig into your own education on this. Okay? But check this out. So, model B. Um, I'm going to use Bitcoin here as my example, but again, you could put in whatever asset you want. Gold's doing pretty good right now. Use real estate, use S&P 500. Okay. So, now if we think about it like this, again, I'm going to start at the million dollars because I like round numbers. Let's say that over the last 2 years it's been going up about 50% a year. If I go to like 3 years or 5 years, it's going up by about 70% per year. But let's just cut that number in half. All right. That's that's too aggressive. Maybe it will never happen. Let's use a 30% number. Okay. So now it's going up by 30% a year. So my Bitcoin value grows and then it grows again. And by the end of the year I have $1.3 million. It's compounding. It's growing. Right. Okay. Then what we want to do is instead of selling the Bitcoin, paying cap gains and no longer having the Bitcoin to compound anymore. What I can do is I can harvest some of this appreciation that's there. I can harvest. I can take it off using debt. Let me show you what I'm talking about. Here's some of the math how we can break this down. So we can harvest only a fraction of the appreciation to help fund our lifestyle. So instead of selling the asset and taking the three risks I just showed you, now we can borrow against just a little bit. Let me give you an example, educational only. So let's say that I only used 15% loan to value because like, hey, it's risky and like if the price drops, you know, 70, 80%, I could get liquidated. So I'll use 15%. I'll only borrow 15% of my borrowing capacity. All right. Then let's say again, right, I only need $120,000. So here if I had the million dollars, it went up 30%. Now it's 1.3 and I borrowed $120 against it at like a, I'm only at a 9% loan to value. Very low risk. The chance of me getting liquidated is extremely low in my opinion. Educational purposes only. Uh, but you can see I could just continue to harvest that over time. Let me show you how that works.

Step three, the cost of the capital. This is the key piece for you to pay attention to. Let's say that I could borrow against my Bitcoin at about 10%. Is that a lot? Well, it just depends. We have to compare it to something. Compared to what? Well, if I'm paying 10% to borrow against the Bitcoin to give me some of this cost of living, but it's going up by 30%, that doesn't sound too expensive to me, does it at all? So, the annual interest on the loan would be $12,000. That's the cost of harvesting some of that appreciation off of the Bitcoin. And this interest can now be paid from cash flow. So, let's say that I'm still making cash flow. I'm working. I have income coming in. I can pay that. Maybe it's tax-deductible because it's an interest-only payment. Or I could roll it into the loan. So I could borrow a little bit extra, put it aside, and I could just roll that payment into the loan. So it can continue to go year after year. Here's kind of what this would look like. So let's say that Bitcoin value at the end of the year again was that 1.3 went up by 30%. But now I have debt outstanding of $120,000. That means my net Bitcoin equity is still $1.18 as opposed to if I had sold it and it would have gone down. Again, uh, it funded my lifestyle. I didn't have to sell any Bitcoin and I didn't pay any taxes because you don't pay tax on the debt. Let me give you a graphical chart of what this can look like over a long period of time. Remember the law of compounding and how that works. So, let's just say like over five years, starting with that 1 million number, taking a 30% CAGR. Remember, that's about half of what we've been seeing. Um, we now in five years that's about $3.7 million in Bitcoin because I never stopped the compounding. If I sold it, I end the compounding. My debt is going up though because I'm not paying off the debt. So, I owe $780,000, but against $3.7 million of Bitcoin. My loan to value is only about 21% at this point. My net equity would be almost $3 million. By year 10, the Bitcoin value has gone from 3.7 to almost 14 million. But my debt has also gone up. Now I owe $1.8 million. But $1.8 million against 14 million in Bitcoin, I only have a 13% LTV. It's getting better. And I have $12 million equity. And again, on year 20 now, the Bitcoin could be up to 190 million with a total debt of 4.4 million. Hypothetical numbers, education only. Put your own CAGR in there. But I believe this number should continue to outpace other assets for a long period of time. And I'm going to tell you exactly why in a second. But what I do want to show you is this. The plan B has your wealth continuing to go parabolic, going higher and higher and higher, while the traditional path that your advisor has you on has you going down to zero. I call that the liquidation plan. Liquidation plan or plan B. Those are your options.

But let me show you why this should work over a long period of time. The goal is to outrun or outpace the debt. Is that possible? So, a lot of people would ask me, Mark, at what point do we pay off the debt? Well, I would say, well, why would you ever pay off the debt? I would never want to pay off the debt as long as the CAGR, the compound annual growth rate, is more than the interest rate. So, if I'm paying 10% but it's going up by 20% a year, then I would just want to keep that going. I don't want to interrupt the compounding. I don't want to pay the taxes. I don't want to lose the opportunity cost of the asset, the three costs. But also more importantly, if we look at Bitcoin's CAGR over a long period of time, we can see that over two years, it's about 50% a year. Three years, 75% a year, 10 years, 70% a year. But will this continue? How long will this continue for? Will it be like this for the next 3 years, 5 years, 20 years, 30 years? Well, let's take a look at it like this. The reason why I expect Bitcoin's CAGR to continue in somewhat of a similar fashion. Well, there's a whole bunch of ways. As a matter of fact, I broke down the entire math for the next 30 years broken out by what the government projects it to be. Um, and I'll put a link down in the show notes down below. But real quickly, we think about it like this. We understand that digital assets always move faster, the digitization of money, what Bitcoin is doing. And we understand that it should always move faster than physical assets. So, it should move faster than the NASDAQ, which are tech stocks. It's not going to move as fast as that. But if the NASDAQ has been doing 15 to 20%, which it is, then Bitcoin should at least outperform that. We know that the NASDAQ, which is the tech stocks, technology digitization moving faster than physical. So the NASDAQ outperforms the S&P 500. So if the S&P 500 is doing 8 to 15%, the NASDAQ's doing 15 to 20, Bitcoin is going to outperform that. But productive assets, companies that produce value will always be higher than the debt service. So debts always should be in the 3 to 6% range. S&P in the 8 to 15% range, NASDAQ 15 to 20, and Bitcoin 20 to 50. Now over time, these could fluctuate. This is not a fixed number, but over a long period of time, we should see Bitcoin staying above what we would expect in the NASDAQ, above what we'd expect in the Bitcoin or the S&P 500. And both of these should be above the debt. Uh, most of these companies in the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ use debt in order to grow. This is not something new that I've just thought up, you know, out of nowhere. These companies use debt to grow because their growth is more than the debt service. All right, that's how this works. And really, what we're doing is we're just changing, like I said, from an owner to uh from a consumer to an owner. And the structural difference is again the liquidation model that you've been taught, your financial advisor has you on where income comes from selling off my asset, selling my principal. And now when the markets go down, I have to sell even more. I can't just sell the four or 10%. Now I got to sell 30%. Because the valuation dropped, my capital base continues to shrink over time. Remember, you either earn compound interest or you pay it. In this case, you're paying the compounded interest and the risk accelerates over time and I might run out and be at zero before I die. But the difference is my income comes from harvesting appreciation from my assets that the compounding never interrupts. In down markets, it doesn't matter. The markets can be volatile and maybe my LTV number changes, but I don't lose capital in a down market. My capital base remains intact, continues to grow, continues to compound over long periods of time, and my risk declines over time because my asset base is continuing to compound.

All right, now I'm sure that sounds really good to you by now, right? You're like, "Wow, that sounds almost like magic." And again, that's just how the world works. But I already can hear it. I can already hear all the comments flooding in on this video right now. But what about the whatever risk you can think of? But what about the leverage? And what about the payments? And what about the interest rate? And what about the risk? And what about the fear of liquidation? And what if, what if, what if? And I don't want to diminish that because there's actually risk in here. But the key is is that yes, it may be risky, but every single retirement model is. So it's not like one has risk, one doesn't. It's that there's always risk. We want to understand which risks we have to navigate around and we have to engineer around. Every retirement model has risk. I already showed you the liquidation model. The risk is that you're going to run out of money before you die. That's a big risk. The risk is you'll never even have enough money to retire. That's a big risk. People are feeling that today. So, I don't like that risk. How do I mitigate against that? Well, I try to grow my assets. But then the debt, the credit, the leverage is risky. Great. How do we mitigate that? We want to design around it. Now, I like to think of liquidity. I want to make sure I have three layers of liquidity, one, two, and three before my asset base. All right? So I have operating capital, I have short-term capital, I have liquid capital. And so we can mitigate this by building three layers of liquidity. We want to understand the biggest risk is not the volatility of the asset. The biggest risk is probably running out of money, right? The biggest risk is that liquidation model. It's not the volatility itself. It's not being able to hold through the volatility. It's being a forced seller. It's being forced to sell my assets to fund my life even when the volatility brings my prices down. All assets are volatile, some more than others. But if I'm forced to sell in the dip, I have to sell at abnormal size of my assets, which means I get liquidated even faster. And so really, we want to understand that wealth fails when selling is mandatory. I got to pay my bills this month. I know the market's down 20%, I'm still going to sell anyway. Real wealth works when selling stays optional.

What if I told you there's a retirement strategy that takes 5 years or less instead of 40? It doesn't require you to sell your assets and it generates tax-free income for life. Now, everything you've been taught about retirement is based on a system designed in the 1930s in the industrial age when people died at the age of 62. But that system, it's broken and that world no longer exists. Today, we have the first new financial asset in 500 years, Bitcoin, enabling entirely new financial strategies. And with these, we can take wealth secrets of the 1% and we can apply them to our own lives to achieve retirement in 5 years or less. So whether you're dreaming of replacing your income, you're behind on your retirement goals, or already wealthy but wish you had more tax-free cash flow, make sure you stay until the end because I'm going to break down the exact blueprint for creating tax-free retirement income using Bitcoin in just 5 years or less. Now, my name is Mark Moss. I'm a tech-focused venture capital investor who's built multiple 8-figure companies in the Bitcoin ecosystem. I've coached thousands of entrepreneurs on how to use wealth strategies of the 1% to achieve their financial goals in a fraction of the time. And these exact strategies are available to you right now. But first, let me show you why the retirement systems you've been sold is mathematically guaranteed to fail.

All right, so bad news and then good news. The bad news is we have a retirement crisis. The good news is I can show you how to fix it and achieve retirement in five years or less, almost no matter where you're starting from. Okay, now this is going to be a little bit of a longer video because I want to go deep. I want to give you the exact blueprint because there's massive hope for you if you deploy these strategies. Okay, so first thing, retirement crisis. It's a really big deal, a really big problem. And the problem is that the system, it doesn't work. As I said in the intro, you were taught to follow a plan that was built in the industrial era using industrial era tools, industrial era financial strategies, and we're not in that world anymore. We went to the information age and now we're moving into the intelligence age. And so the tools that you've been trained, what you've been taught, it no longer applies. And we can see this in any number of ways. I can show you factually nearly half of baby boomers, the people who were taught in that era and followed the plans, nearly half of baby boomers have no retirement savings. We can talk, we're going to talk about why, but this is the fact, okay, that it doesn't work. We can see that. We can see even worse here. Baby boomers in America are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression. It's a big deal. It's a big, big problem. Here's what's driving this terrible trend. They don't have any money. That's what's driving this trend. And we can see that, of course, we know simply the problem is they don't have money. But what does that really mean under the hood? Well, again, half have no money. Of the half that do have money, it's about on average $200,000. So half no money, half that have money, it's $200,000, which is not going to be enough. As a matter of fact, it's not going to be anywhere near enough because number one, that was the plan when you were going to live to 62. Now people are living to 82, a couple decades longer. How is it going to last that long? And we can see per Vanguard right here, this tells us that despite record high markets, so all the markets are at all-time highs right now. Despite that, the median 401k balance for those 65 and over was $232,000. So a little bit higher than $200,000. But here's the bad news. Because what traditional financial advice tells you is that you could withdraw 4% per year for the rest of your life. Maybe I'm going to tell you why that's wrong. But even if that's the case, 4% withdrawal provides less than $800 a month in income. How are you going to live on that? I don't care where you live in the United States. Uh, you're not going to live on $800 a month. Maybe you move to some third world country and maybe $800 gets you by, but it's not going to happen here in the United States and any developed country that you're in.

Now, it gets even worse. Don't worry, there's lots of hope on the other side. But I need you to understand this. It gets even worse because what we really have is an illusion of wealth, right? So, again, as we showed you, even at record all-time highs, it's still not enough. Why is that? Because when you look at your retirement savings account, your 401k, your mutual fund, your S&P 500 index, it's screaming new all-time highs. But why don't you feel more wealthy? And that's the illusion of wealth. So, what we can see here, I use this chart quite often. The orange line is global liquidity. This is the money supply expanding around the world. The black line is the S&P 500. And what you can see is that the black line, S&P 500, basically moves along with global liquidity. It's like a perfect proxy. So what this means is that on paper it looks like you're getting more wealthy, but the purchasing power of that paper is not going up. That's the illusion of wealth. So even though on paper you're getting more wealthy, even though we're at record highs, you're not getting ahead. And before we get into how we fix this, there's even one more thing you need to think about. And that is that this strategy they're teaching you, which is that, you know, you can pull 4% out in perpetuity. Well, it doesn't really work if you're unlucky. If you just happen to be retiring in one of these big drawdowns. If you retired here, you can't pull 4% here. If you retired here, how do you pull 4%? That's a 15-year period here. If you retired here, how do you pull 4% out there? So, now if you retired here, sure. Okay. If you retired here, sure. So, it then comes down to luck. I'm not putting my future into luck's hands. I don't know about you. And this all comes down because you've been taught the wrong strategy. Factually, it doesn't work. I just proved that to you. Okay? So, traditional financial advice doesn't work. It's not anywhere as near as good as the cheat code, the five-year retirement plan, which I'm going to fill you in on. But traditional advice is what you should do is save for retirement. So then when you're old enough, you can sell your assets to pay for to get the income to pay for your living expenses. Now the problem with that is that most of you are investing that money into a tax-deferred account. So that means when you sell your assets for income, you get to pay taxes on the withdrawals. 20, 30, 40, 50% of the money you get back goes to the government. The problem with this specifically for me is then you deplete your principal over time. So your assets are getting smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller. And the goal, you're crossing your fingers, crossing your heart, hoping to die, hoping that you don't outlive your savings. What if you live longer? Please, hopefully you do. What if you're healthy? You live longer. And then you outlive your savings. What kind of problem is that? And then again, as I showed you on that previous chart, it's vulnerable to market timing. What happens if you just happen to be retiring in a downturn market? Now, that's a problem. So, and on top of it, it's a 40-year accumulation time frame. If you save for 40 years, maybe it's enough. It's not. You can't think. Just think about this. How are you going to save 10% for 40 years and then live on the same amount of money, your annual salary or 80, 90% of it for another 30 or 40? Like, how does that work? It doesn't. That's why it's failing. Okay? But there is a plan. I'm going to fill you in on that. Don't worry.

But one of my mentors now, one of my good friends, Robert Kiyosaki, he said the traditional retirement model, that one that doesn't work, is a system designed to transfer wealth from the middle class to the financial industry. That's why they teach it to you. Just give us your money for 40 years, let us make all the money, and you end up with nothing. They make about two-thirds of the money that you'll make over your lifetime. So it transfers money from the middle class to the financial industry and the government through fees and taxation. So the financial industry charges you fees for 40 years and when you finally get your money back, half of it goes to the government. But the wealthy, they play a different game. The wealthy use an entirely different playbook. Robert Kiyosaki, do you want the playbook? Don't worry, I'm going to give it to you right now. Okay? Make sure you're paying attention here. We're going to go deep. Again, this is a serious video. This is maybe one of the most important videos I've ever made because I want to change this process. It really makes me mad.

Okay, what is the 1% wealth formula? Well, let's compare it. Let's compare it to the middle class formula and the 1% formula. So, the strategy, how do we think about income? Well, the middle class trade time for money. So, they're working and they're using the money that they get from working to pay for their life. Trading time for money. The wealthy, they make money to build assets and then those assets generate income. It's a different strategy. They're working, they're buying assets. Those assets pay for the life. It's a different strategy. Number two, what about investing? Well, middle class, they save in a tax-deferred account. So, every two weeks, part of your paycheck goes into your 401k, your mutual fund. It's tax deferred. It grows tax deferred. And when I hit that age, 62, 72, whatever, I can pull it out and pay taxes. But the wealthy, they acquire appreciating assets instead. Not tax deferred. They acquire assets that go up in value. Growth. The middle class, they compound their interest at 8 to 10% a year. Hopefully the market doesn't crash and it keeps going up. And you know, 8 to 10% per year it's compounding. But the wealthy, the 1%, they leverage and add velocity. We talk about investing into layers using leverage. So instead of getting 8 to 10%, the wealthy are getting 25%, they're getting 50%, and they're getting 500% gains by investing into layers. Taxes. The middle class, they pay later. Remember, they're deferring. So they're paying a lot of taxes on the money they get up front and then the little bit they put away when they get it out later, they got to pay taxes on it. But the wealthy, they minimize or completely eliminate their taxes. They don't pay that. Why would I want to give up half my money to the government? How fast can I grow if I have to give money to the government? Wealthy do it differently. Assets. Middle class, they sell the assets to fund their retirement. Remember, save for 40 years. Then when you retire, you can sell your assets to pay for your retirement. The wealthy, they do it differently. The 1% they keep their assets forever. They pass that wealth to generation to generation to generation. They do that by borrowing against their assets. The timeline. It takes the middle class 40 years to either have no money, as we saw, or the 50% that do have $200,000, which is enough. It takes them 40 years to get there. But the 1%, they do it in 5 years. Now, I don't know about you, but um, I like this 1% approach better. This is where I want to be. Now, the problem with this is this is typically for 1% wealth. That's been the problem. So, most people haven't been able to tap into this. And some of you might go, "Mark, this is ridiculous. That can't work." Well, how many billionaires do you hang out with? Right? So, you haven't heard of this, but they do it. The problem is it's been reserved for people that have a lot of money. But something changed. We have the new financial asset that enables anyone, you, to do this right now. The single biggest difference between financial success and financial failure. Success or failure, your choice, is owning a few income-producing assets. Grant Cardone. Now, I want to break this down, but it's not what you think. It's not about buying rental real estate like Grant Cardone would tell you. Okay. So, what we want is we want to learn how to use strategic leverage. Keyword: strategic leverage. So, let's again compare the middle class to the 1%. The path I'm going to teach you. Don't worry. The strategy, how do they use debt? Okay. Well, the middle class typically would put like 10% on their home, 5% onto credit cards, 4% into an auto loan. That's the type of credit, type of loans that the middle class would get. The 1% do 30% on a home, 15% of a business, and 10% into investable debt. That's how they use debt. But the leverage is different. Okay, the leverage is that the middle class use the leverage to buy mostly depreciating assets. Okay, the credit cards, it's not appreciating. That's consumer debt. Autos, that's depreciating. So they've used the leverage that they have to buy depreciating assets. Of course, the 1% do it differently. They use leverage to buy assets, 85% into assets that go up in value, not down. Tax efficiency. So they're using leverage to write off their taxes, using debt and leverage to buy assets that give them the tax write-off. 73% business, 62% using other people's money leveraged to build up businesses that are assets that go up in value, and consumer debt less than 5%. So lots of debt, way more debt than the middle class, but it's all strategic leverage. It's all assets that are going up and barely any in consumer debt that's going down. I like this quote from Tom Wright, a tax strategist. The rich use debt to leverage investments and create additional income streams. That's what the rich use it for. While the average person, the middle class person, use debt to buy things that make rich people richer. Don't do it that way. We want to be able to buy assets that make us more wealthy.

Okay, let's talk about the cheat code. Now, the cheat code is Bitcoin. Now, listen, before you roll your eyes and turn this off, let me break it down for you why. I'm not going to go super deep in this because I talk about it all the time, but Bitcoin is the first new financial asset in 500 years. We've had commodities forever, as old as the earth. Obviously, equities were created about 500 years ago. We have a new financial asset. And as our brains are comparing mechanisms, what is it? Well, it's sort of like this and it's sort of like that and it's sort of like that. Sort of. It is like all those things, but it's something new. Now, when we have a new financial asset, it's a new building block that allows us to build new things that we couldn't build before. When we all of a sudden had steel, we could build things we couldn't build before, like skyscrapers and bridges, right? And now we have a new financial asset. And this is what allows people like you and I to do the same playbook as the 1% are doing right now. Why? Well, number one, we have mathematical certainty. So, we have digital scarcity. So we know that the Bitcoin supply goes up. There will never be more than 21 million. And we know the issuance of that. So every four years, the issuance of that Bitcoin that a cap of 21 million goes down, gets cut in half every four years. Do you know what the Fed central bank is issuing money right now, or the commercial banks, or China, or Japan? No, you don't. And so we have this certainty. All right, we have mathematical certainty. Number one. Number two, we have scarcity and demand. So because Bitcoin is finite, all we have to do is understand the demand side. And as long as governments print more money, which seems like a pretty much a certainty, and governments continue to want to increase censorship, then we can see that the demand will continue to rise. Now we can understand the growth trajectory if we zoom out and a lot of you are like, "The market's just too volatile." It is, yes, but to the upside. So if you look at this path, you can see the projection. Now it goes up and it comes down and up and down, up and down within this band. Okay, then we want to understand the growth trajectory. So I kind of showed you the history, but where is it going? Well, we can understand if we look at store of value assets, places that we park money. We save money in Bitcoin, in gold, collectibles, equities, real estate, bonds, and money. It's where we have your savings. In 2010, that was valued at $387 trillion. 2010, $387 trillion. By 2020, this basket of goods was worth $852 trillion, from $330 to $850. Why? Why is that basket of savings, gold, real estate, equities? Why is it getting bigger? It's getting bigger because it's where value is stored. And as the wealth of the world continues to grow, as governments continue to print money, these baskets grow from $380 to $850. Okay? So, we can see that growing. Now, if we project that out based off of run rates, based off of what the government projects they'll continue to have deficit spending and so forth, we can project out from 2020 to where these basket of goods will be by 2030. And this $852 trillion basket will grow into $1.6767 trillion or $1.6 quadrillion. Okay. So then the question is, what percentage of Bitcoin, how fast will Bitcoin continue to grow in this basket? Now we can see in recent history, Bitcoin has been going up by about 50% a year, and we think that will continue for a while. Now that will go down over time and it will continue to go down. But what we understand is when we understand these technology cycles using an S-curve, we know the biggest move is right here in front of us right now. So we have about the next five years to capture this massive, massive run-up, which is why we have a five-year plan. Okay? And we believe that by the end of that run-up in about 5 years, Bitcoin will be about the same size of global store value assets as gold. Bitcoin and gold would be about on par, about 20% each. Now, if you want a full breakdown of this, I have a whole presentation where I explain all this in super great detail. We'll link to it down below if you want to understand that. Okay? But that's why this is the cheat code. It's the first asset that's going up this fast and it allows us to do things that were typically only reserved for the wealthy that have a lot of money. Okay. So, now that we have this new asset, this new cheat code, what kind of strategy can we deploy? Well, let's take a look. So number one, because we

Have this growth potential. What happens is historical growth rate equals self-repaying. What does that mean? So we want to instead of selling assets, we borrow against the assets, right? So as long as the asset is growing faster than the rate of borrowing costs, then it's basically self-paying. If I have an asset going up by 50% and I can borrow against it at 15%, I have a positive carry of 35%. I can do that forever.

Number two, divisibility. With an asset like Bitcoin, I can borrow against small portions of it. Unlike real estate. So with real estate, you have a million-dollar building. You have to refinance the million dollars. But what if you just need 50 grand? But you still got to refinance the million dollars. But I don't want to. That loan is good. I don't want to do it with hassle. Okay. With Bitcoin, I can borrow against, I can take 5,000 or 10,000 or 50 or whatever divisibility that you want.

Uh, liquidity. 24/7 global market for collateral liquidity. The stock market's only open on uh, banking hours on the weekdays. Again, trying to get money out of uh, real estate could take a long time. I could literally pull out my phone right now and pull liquidity out against my Bitcoin in minutes directly from my phone. Uh, it's borderless, jurisdictionally free. I can use this money globally. Of course, if I take money from my house, if I refinance my house, it probably needs to stay in that same jurisdiction in the same type of asset. But with Bitcoin, it's borderless.

Non-correlation. Low correlation to traditional financial markets. So, it's completely out of the system and it's verifiable. So, I have true ownership. When I get it, I have it. I know I have it. Nobody else has it. That's what makes this asset the cheat code and uniquely positioned to pull off this strategy right now. Okay.

So, if we compare this, remember this is the old way. We don't like that. Selling assets for income, paying taxes on withdrawals, depleting principal over time so you die with zero. Hope you don't outlive your savings. Heaven forbid you live longer. Uh, vulnerable to market timings. 40 years, that's a non-starter. So the strategy, the cheat code strategy, the five-year retirement is allowing us to keep our assets so they continue to grow over time. They continue to grow for the rest of our life. And even better, when I die and pass them on to my heirs, they keep growing for them.

Okay. Number two, we can borrow against our assets tax-free. So over here, when I sold my assets to pay for my life, then I had to pay the taxes. Remember all that money in my 401k was growing tax-deferred. But when I pull it out, I got to pay taxes. Over here, instead, I borrow against the asset and that money is debt. So it's tax-free. I don't pay any money on that. Over here, I never deplete my principal. My principal continues to go up and up and up forever, which means I can pass wealth to the next generation. I don't have to hope that I die earlier than my money runs out. Instead, I can live forever. My assets live forever. And that value gets passed to future generations. It's immune to market timing risk. We don't have to worry about if the stock market's going to plunge for 15 years because we're not selling the asset. We don't need to sell at a high point or a low point. We're not selling it. We're borrowing against it. And this allows us to have a five-year implementation time frame. Even if you start right now, we're going to break down the math for you.

So, let's take a look at this. Okay, so for the five-year blueprint, three simple steps. Step number one, start getting some Bitcoin. You got to have some Bitcoin to do this. So, strategic accumulation. Couple ways you can do this. Obviously, number one, just go buy it. We call that lump sum buying. Number two, you can dollar cost average into it. Every two weeks, some of your paycheck can go into it if you want to do it that way, or you can just go buy some right now. I don't want to get into the ins and outs of which one is better. They're both good. It depends on what you're trying to do based off of this or anything that we're talking about. If you want me to go deeper, leave it in the comments down below. All right.

Number two, then once we have the Bitcoin, we use strategic leverage, collateralized lending against that. And then the loans that we get become the cash flow that we can use. Let me break this down for you with a calculator. Now, real quick, I want to let you get your own calculator. I have this done and I have a book right here that breaks all of this down into great detail. And I want to give you this book for free. And I want to give you this calculator completely free. We'll link to it down below. You can have it. It's not a trick. Go ahead and get it. All right.

So, here's how this works. I can put up here my starting date. So, beginning of this year, 2025. And I can put in how much Bitcoin I have. So, let's say I start with one Bitcoin right here. One Bitcoin, $100,000. Now, in five years, this Bitcoin will go up. Now, these are my projections of how much it will gain based off of the past history and what the government tells us as far as money printing will continue. They project that for the next 30 years. Okay. So, and there's also on the calculator you can go back test it on this on your own. So, Bitcoin typically has three good years and then a drawdown year. So, I imagine we'll continue that. Now, it doesn't continue going up at the same rate, but it also doesn't continue going down at the same rate. So, I've modeled that as well. Again, go watch the full video on this model to understand this and you can plug in your own numbers. But if I have one Bitcoin right here, it's worth about $100,000 today. And I wait until 2030, five years from now. I would then borrow against it $111,000. That's 13% of my total value. I'm going to borrow 13%. 13% LTV. I borrow $111,000. $11,000 of that goes into an interest reserve account. It sits in an account and it makes my payment for me. That means I have $100,000 of free cash flow. I don't pay tax on it. I can spend that $100,000 however I want. And what this will allow is every single year in perpetuity for me to pull out $100,000 tax-free to live off on. So if this model holds, and I can break it down for you why I think it does, again, we'll link to that down below. You could have one Bitcoin about $100,000 today and in five years from now pull out $100,000 in perpetuity.

Now, let's compare this to what the traditional financial model is. Remember, half of the baby boomers who have money have about $200,000. They're being told they can pull out about 4% per year. Uh, heaven forbid the markets crash, which is about, you know, eight or $9,000 a year versus this the same. Well, the $200,000 would get them $200,000 a year. So, would you rather wait 40 years, save up 200 grand and have 800 a month or, you know, 9 grand a year or would you rather have 200 grand and uh, pull out 200 grand a year in five years? Obviously, the answer is pretty simple. Okay, so that's the math of this. And like I said, I want to break all that down for you. So, go watch the other video.

But we can understand also the next thing you're going to ask is, "But Mark, what about market cycles?" Yes. So we can see that again, we see, you know, we know when they go up, we know when they go down, up and down. So here I might borrow only, you know, 10 to 15% against my stack. Here I could feel good, you know, borrowing 50 to 60% against my stack. We can time all that and again, the calculator models all of that. Now traditionally and again, this is only possible to deploy these strategies, the 1% now because we have a new financial asset. All you got to do is buy it and wait five years and not mess this up.

But wait, wait, wait. I can already hear it. But Mark, Mark, Mark, what about all the risk? What about if? What if? Uh, but Bitcoin's too volatile. Well, remember, smart risk management strategies. Understand where we're at in the cycle. Understand how much debt and leverage I want to put against it at different times. But what, but what about the regulations? Well, in the United States, the president of the United States is buying it. The US, United States is buying it themselves. Uh, the regulations are are free and clear. Is it, is it really tax-free? Of course, it's tax-free because you're not taking out profit. You're taking debt. Debt is not taxed.

All right. What if I only have X? What if I only have a little bit of money? Well, you can scale. You can scale up. I put $100,000 for round numbers. Put 10,000. Put 1,000. Put whatever number that you have. And then, of course, if you don't have the money that you need, go make more money. But again, you need one a small fraction of what you would need in the traditional financial system. Uh, what about security? This is the big one. Okay. What about security? Because if I, if I did this with Celsius, if I did this with BlockFi and they went out of business, they went bankrupt, they stole the money, whatever it was, I didn't get my Bitcoin back. Yes. So, number one, make sure you retain ownership of the Bitcoin. Make sure it stays in your name. Number two, make sure it's secured properly so it can't get stolen or hacked. Number three, make sure you have some sort of like insurance against that. So in case something that you didn't account for happened, it's insured. And then number four, make sure you're using proper risk management on your own. And again, in the book, again, you can have it for free down below, will explain all of that to you in greater detail.

Okay, here's what I want to leave you with. If there's one thing I want to rail against the financial system, it's this. Okay, that strategy, it doesn't work. You don't want to do that. There's no real path for success there. But most people could have this done in a couple of years. All right? But all you have to do is don't mess this up. Don't mess this up. Look, I put this uh, post on X the other day and it was like Larry Fink, the largest asset manager in the world, he says to buy Bitcoin. And Ray Dalio, the largest hedge fund manager of the world, says to buy Bitcoin. Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is saying buy Bitcoin. And you might still think it's like a scam. You're not smarter than those guys. Do not mess this up. We have this very unique window right now for the next 12 to 24 months. I showed you the charts why you have five years. Don't mess this up. All you do is take one easy step. You just buy Bitcoin. You can outperform every single hedge fund in the in in the US, every single fund, every single retirement plan. You don't need to save 40 years. This is literally the cheat code. One simple thing, but you're at a crossroads. You have two paths forward. Do you take the 40-year path or do you take the less than five-year path? That's up to you. As I said in the quote earlier, it's not about being lucky. It's about taking the right action. So, this is only one piece of the puzzle. If you want to learn the entire system or how you can apply the system to yourself, then you might want to go watch this video that I have right here, which breaks it down into even more detail. And I'll see you over there.