Transcription
Retirement isn't real. I think you need to hear this differently. The 40 years of work and then, you know, 20 years of golf version, the 401K, the Social Security version, the just make it to 65 version, it's not a real financing strategy and it never was.
It's a marketing campaign invented by a German Chancellor in 1869, imported to America in the 1930s to get older workers out of factories and it was sold to your parents because industrial companies needed predictable labor. Now, it was never designed to make you wealthy, it was designed to keep you working forever.
Now, today, I want to replace that with a system, a system I call the personal treasury and the personal treasury pays forever. It works at any age and it doesn't require you to hit a magic number and hope. Ready? Let's go.
All right, so in order to break down this misconception, this false belief, I want to tell you exactly why, but before, let's start with the proof. We know that the largest segment of the population right now today is the baby boomers. There's about 11,000 of them retiring every single day right now. The data tells us that that model that they grew up on, your parents' model, the model you're following, which is go to school, get good grades, save for 40 years and hopefully retire, we can talk about why it doesn't work, we can talk about the math, but the data shows us that it completely failed and we know this because half of baby boomers today are retiring with zero savings.
And while that's staggering, while that is a total failure of the system, it gets even worse because of the half that do have savings, they have an average of about $240,000. What that means is when you follow retirement philosophy and math, you're able to sell about 4% of your portfolio per year. Well, if you have $240,000, that's good for, I don't know, a few hundred bucks a month. How are you going to live on that?
So, I'm going to tell you why it doesn't work and I'm going to tell you a better way to make it work, but the math alone tells you how that system ends up. When you're saving for retirement, first of all, you're depending on your income or your labor. Now, most salaries go up by about 3% a year. So, as you're working for 20, 30, 40 years, the increase in your pay is going up by about 3% a year, which sounds pretty bad because it is. When you realize the cost of living is going up between 8 to 10% a year. So, no matter how much harder you're working, no matter how many pay raises you get, or how many extra shifts you pick up, the rate of pay is falling behind the cost of living.
Now, of course, that's what investing is for. And so, now you're going to be taking some of your money, hopefully 5%, 10%, and you're going to put that into some retirement plan, some pension plan, 401k. The average retirement plan, 401k mutual fund, is averaging somewhere between 6 and a half, maybe up to 7%, 8% at best per year. But, think about the math. How is it possible that I could save 5 or 10% a year for 30, 40 years, and then I could live another 30, 40 years on 100% of my income? Obviously, the math doesn't work.
But, the bigger problem is hidden in the math itself. If I'm investing 5% of my wealth and it's growing at 6 and a half, 7 and a half percent when I look at a 30-year average, but the cost of living is going up at 8 or 10%, then even the small amount I'm saving is not going up at the rate that's keeping up with the rate of my cost of living going up. So, you can understand why the math doesn't work. It never worked, which is why we can see the baby boomers today all failing in retirement.
Now, this is exactly why in 1889, the German Chancellor Bismarck created the pension system. They wanted to keep you working forever. They needed to create incentive for you to stay inside the system. And so, as long as you're working in the system, you can contribute part of your salary into the system, and it keeps you stuck, and it keeps you trapped. It's what we call golden handcuffs. Golden handcuffs because it's good. I mean, you have money being saved and it's growing, but you're handcuffed to the sense that you have no control over your own future, over your own wealth. And for me, that's a a.
Now, I've already told you why the math is broken. It's mathematically impossible to achieve your goals in the traditional pension system, and I told you the stats of the baby boomers today. But, let me give you one more reason, as if you need even more. The entire Wall Street industrial complex was built to keep your money as long as possible. They get paid on a fee-based model. That means that as long as you have your money in the system, they take a percentage of it. How much do they take? Well, it depends on which product they sell you. Typically, most financial advisors are trying to sell you their own product. But, if you look at a traditional 401k or a mutual fund, over the life of your plan, let's call it over three decades, they'll typically make 75% of the profits, and you'll end up with about 25%. It's why your financial advisor is driving your yacht. They make the lion's share of the money while they manage your money in low-performing funds and fee with fees on top, while you're working and hoping and praying.
Now, before I tell you what replaces this system, so you don't have to deal with this anymore, as if I haven't already laid out enough proof, let's just think about a couple more stats. 57% of baby boomers expect to retire at 70 or older, or do not plan to retire at all. Not because they don't want to, because they can't. 64% of Americans over 65 are still working, with the primary reason they can't afford to retire. 80% of older workers plan to work past 65 because they don't have enough finances.
Now, if that wasn't bad enough, let me just give you one more before we move into the solution here. The entire plan was doomed from the beginning. And I've already told you the math why, but let me give you one more reason. The entire plan focuses on that by the time you reach retirement, 30-40 years of working and saving, you'll be able to sell down your assets. Again, I talked about 4% of your portfolio per year. So, you're literally selling off your assets, and what you're hoping and crossing your fingers on and praying for is that you'll die before you run out of money. Die with zero. There's a book on that. They want you to literally die with zero. And I just reject that premise altogether. I want my wealth to compound forever. For my lifetime and for my future generations' lifetime. And that's how we make sure that we never run out of money. Which is why we've created what's called the personal treasury.
Now, in plain language, what a personal treasury is is someone who thinks about the assets that they have rather than the income. You see, the financial industrial complex has trained you to think like a worker. They've trained you to think about your profit and loss. They've trained you to focus on the income or the revenue that you generate. So, I make this much money. If I want more income, if I want more wealth later, I have to make more income and I have to work longer, work harder, start a side hustle, create a new business, things like that. And I'm constantly focused on the income side of the equation. And then, I could try to manage the expense side, the P&L. I can skip my morning coffee and I can save an extra four bucks a day. I could live a miserable life and hopefully save a little more. Sounds terrible. I reject that.
And so, rather than focusing on the P&L, the profit and loss, there's only so much you can make. There's only so much you can cut out of your life. What we want to do is shift from a worker mindset to an owner mindset. Instead of focusing on the profit and loss, we focus on the assets. We focus on our personal treasury. We think about what assets do we have in our personal treasury. We think about return on our equity instead of the return on our assets. We think about ways that we can compound the wealth of our assets because our assets compound at multiple times the rate of the cost of living increases. And so, if you can shift your mindset from the worker to the owner, to the personal treasury plan, then your entire future life could be different.
So, while the cost of living is going up by 8 to 10% a year and my income's going up by only 3% a year. And if I save in the traditional plan of mutual funds and 401ks, I'm going up at 6.5%, I'm losing money. So, what we have to do is instead of focusing on our investments and our return on investments, our return on assets, and investing horizontally. Horizontally is where I have income coming in and 5% goes here and 10% goes there and 17% goes there and it's horizontal. A treasurer thinks differently. A treasurer thinks in layers. Instead of investing horizontally, we want to invest vertically. And we get $1 multiple jobs.
Now, a way that I like to explain this is that the main metric that the government uses to measure the health of the economy is something called the velocity of money. What the velocity of money does, and this is the main metric they're driving for. As a matter of fact, back in COVID during 2020, velocity had dropped so low that they had to get the velocity up. Meaning, because of course the entire world was shut down, there was nowhere to spend money and everybody was scared, so they were saving, they were hoarding. So, in order to get people spending, in order to get the velocity going again, they created stimmy and they sent out trillions of dollars of stimulus to stimulate the economy to get the velocity back up. The velocity of money is very simple. What is the gross domestic product? What is the total value of the economy divided by the amount of money in there?
Let me give you an example. If I spend $20 on lunch and that person that made me the burgers gave the $20 to the person that brought the buns to them and that delivery driver took the $20 and gave it to the gas station and the gas station took the $20 and gave it to the landlord. That same $20 has now created $100 of economic growth. But with only $20 in. So, what we want to do as a treasurer is think the same way. How much wealth can I create for myself with $1? How many jobs can I get the $1 to do? How many assets can I get compounding at the same time with $1 of input? So, when you start thinking about it differently, you start asking those different questions, you start seeing a completely different way.
What most people think is in order to get a higher return, I must take on more risk. So, what's the meme stock that I have to buy? What's the penny stock that I could spend all day on Reddit and I could try to find and hopefully get in and out before it pumps and dumps. Maybe there's a crypto token that I don't get rug pulled on. What is the risk I could take to make that outsized return? But a treasurer thinks differently. How do I just take a couple assets that I know, I like, I understand, real estate, Bitcoin, the Nasdaq. But instead of chasing out the risk curve on assets I don't know, I can engineer the return profile I need by investing in layers and getting those dollars to do multiple jobs. That's the way a treasurer works.
So, let me give you an example. We have $100,000 and what most people would do is they would divide this up. They'd follow a Ray Dalio model, you know, all-weather portfolio, and they would find 17 different positions non-correlated. And so, they'd put some into bonds, maybe that's uh, you know, 40% into bonds, and then they'd put, you know, 30% into stocks. And then in those stocks, they would break those up into a bunch of things that they don't know or understand. Then they might put some into some private equity, and they would split this up. And they'd say, "Well, if I can get 10% return here, and I can get a 20% return here, and I can get a 5% return there, my blended return could be 15%." But the wealthy think about it differently. We want to engineer the return we need without all this complexity.
What we want to do is we want to take our $100,000, and we want to invest it vertically. So, I might put it into a tax depreciation asset first, like a home. What this home does, it allows me to buy a $500,000 asset with the $100,000. With that $500,000, I get now income. I also get tax depreciation, and I also get the compounding growth of this, call that 5% a year. But I get these other benefits as well. Then, let's say that I have equity in this home after a period of time, I could pull out, let's call $250,000 of that equity, and I could put that into another investment. Let's call that Bitcoin. Now, that Bitcoin is compounding at, let's call it, 30% a year. Then I could say take $125,000 of that Bitcoin out, and then I could put that into the Nasdaq here at, say, 17%. Now, when I add up what this $100,000 is doing, one job, two jobs, three jobs, and I take my blended return here, I'm closer to 25 or 30% return. And with much less complexity. Three assets, standard assets that most people know, versus the complexity of this at half the rate.
Now, before we talk more about how you can achieve this, I think it's worth digging into the very fact of why I think retirement is wrong altogether. We can go into countless studies, and we can show how Alzheimer's sets in early because you're not using your brain. We can talk about depression because there's no purpose of your life. We can talk about all those things. But, let's just ask a simple question. Again, the consumer mindset that's being pushed on you, this pension plan, this 401k, this Wall Street worker mentality that's been forced on you, creates this carrot for you for 40 years where you dream of one day being able to do whatever you want to do. I want to sit by the pool all day and have someone bring me drinks or whatever. But, if that was really the true objective in life, if the ultimate goal was really to get to a point one day where you no longer have to work, hopefully one day you have enough money where you don't have to work, then ask yourself this question. Why do all billionaires still work? Certainly not a money problem. And it's because the goal is not to do nothing with your life. The goal that we're chasing is not freedom from work. The goal is freedom to work on things that stimulate me, that give me energy, that give me purpose, and that ultimately bring value to the world. And so, I think the entire premise that all this is built on, the entire purpose of your life, the goal of your entire life is built on a faulty premise. And again, we know that. Why are billionaires still working?
And so, I ask a different question. If your plan is 30 years of drudgery to get to that eventual carrot, maybe that's a non-starter. And maybe you should start there. Now, of course, most people spend their entire lives trying to make more money without ever stopping to question the system they're putting that money into. That's the single worst trap that you can fall into.
Now, if you want more, the next video right here shows you the actual wealth framework that sophisticated investors use instead of the traditional retirement model. I'll see you over there.