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522: A Wealth Mindset in Real Estate Investing with Garrett Gunderson
About this Episode
Firebrand speaker and author of "Killing Sacred Cows", Garrett Gunderson, joins us to discuss wealth mindset and value creation. Also, Keith touches on the impact of falling interest rates on various loans and the economy noting that lower rates can benefit savers and investors.
Historical data shows that home prices have only fallen 6 times in the last 83 years, signaling the rarity of significant price declines.
Learn about the Rockefeller method, which involves using trusts and whole life insurance to preserve and grow wealth.
Garrett advocates for investing in real estate, businesses, and intellectual property rather than mutual funds or ETFs.
DM Garrett on Instagram to receive a free copy of his book on the Rockefeller method.
Resources:
Alon Instagram @garrettbgunderson
Join our upcoming GRE live event right here! - 'New Turnkey Properties with ZERO Money Down' on Thursday 10/24.
Show Notes:
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Complete episode transcript:
Automatically Transcribed With Otter.ai
Keith Weinhold 00:01
Welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, talking about what falling interest rates really mean to you. 10 years of the GRE podcast, politics are overrated. How often do home prices fall? The latest in AI generated podcasting and then wealth mindset and wealth preservation all today on get rich education.
00:27
Since 2014 the powerful get rich education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from passive real estate investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord. Show Host Keith Weinhold writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad advisors, and delivers a new show every week since 2014 there's been millions of listener downloads of 188 world nations. He has a list show guests and key top selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki, get rich education can be heard on every podcast platform, plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android listener phone apps build wealth on the go with the get rich education podcast. Sign up now for the get rich education podcast, or visit get rich education.com
Corey Coates 01:12
You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.
Keith Weinhold 01:28
Welcome to GRE from Evansville, Indiana to Victorville, California and across 488 nations worldwide for an entire decade of your life now, this is Get Rich Education. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, what does it mean that we're in an era of falling interest rates from the recent peaks, rates of all types have fallen. Mortgage rates have fallen. The Fed funds rate has fallen, and that prime rate has fallen too. I mean the prime rate that you pay, that's basically the Fed funds rate plus 3% and why the prime rate matters to you is that can affect credit cards, home equity loans, automobile loans and small business loans, every one of them down, down, down. So to any savvy investor that knows what's going on in the 21st century? This can mean celebration for your wallet, for your finances. And look in old days, lower rates, that would be bad news, not good news. And why is this? Well, in olden days, and some people still have an outdated mindset, lower rates are bad because savings accounts used to make sense back in the day, and lower interest rates means lower rates for savers on their bank, savings accounts. Yeah, those 5% online only savings accounts are going to four and a half with the Fed's half point rate cut last month. Well, 100 years ago, you could be a saver. That made some sense, because their interest rates could reliably beat inflation over time, but not today. Today, since inflation transfers wealth from lenders to borrowers and inflation redistributes wealth from savers to debtors. For those like us that understand this and act accordingly, we are indeed the beneficiaries of lower interest rates. Now, there are other effects out there in the economy. Cheaper loans could lead to more m&a activity, more mergers and acquisitions that can benefit investment banks like your Goldman Sachs that facilitates those transactions. Well, what happens to real estate prices amidst lower interest rates? What happens is that they tend to rise now here on the show, you remember that since 2022 I have discussed what has surprised a lot of people. Amidst rising interest rates, the environment that we used to have, home prices tend to rise. And it has happened again. When mortgage rates tripled, prices kept right on rising. So you might wonder, well, wait a second, which is it or I'm confused, amidst rising interest rates, home prices rise and amidst falling interest rates, home prices rise too. And the answer is yes, look at history over hunches. To our newsletter readers, I recently sent you that great chart, a table, I guess it showed the national home price, rate of appreciation or depreciation for every single year, going back to World War Two and from 1942 until today, those 83 years, how many times do you think that home prices fell over the last 83 years? There were exactly six, six of the last 83 years, only six where home prices fell. Paradoxically, interest rates don't have much to do with home prices, and this is all per Case Shiller statistics. Over the last 83 years, there were only six down years. 72 were up. Five were even. And of those six down years in the last 83 five of the six down years were tied up in a once. I mean, it took a once in several generations confluence, a cataclysm of events to occur during the global financial crisis, 2007 to 2011 all at once. Back then, it was a housing supply, surplus, disgustingly lawless mortgage market, cheap credit and a preponderance of debt in the banking system since World War 2, 83 years ago, there was only one other year when home prices fell, that was 1990 when they fell by 1%. If you're waiting for Home prices to fall substantially, it is super unlikely that that is going to happen. Just look at history, and today's market has more than the housing shortage in loads of protective homeowner equity, which means low delinquency rates, and we have permanently inflated higher prices baked into replacement costs of all kinds, land, architecture, engineering, permitting, regulation, labor, building, equipment, construction materials all over the place, but us, you know, as real estate investors, we might be more interested in rent appreciation than prices just four years ago, you know, just then to pay $2,000 to rent a single family home. I mean, that was quite a nice place in the Midwest and South. And today I have modest single family rentals built 50 years ago that are about 1200 square feet, and now they rent for $2,000 $2,000 a month's rent that is common today, and we are rooting for rents to appreciate faster than home prices. And if you want to get our newsletter, you're probably on that list by now, and reading it, I just send some of the best charts in real estate maps to you. You can sign up free right now. Just do it while it's on your mind. Text GRE to 66866, that's text GRE to 66866, for our Don't quit your Daydream Letter. Political season is heating up. We are at a time where we are one month from a general election, and that means we're electing a new president, vice president, 1/3 of the Senate, the entire house of representatives and various state and local officials. Yes, politics matter. Politics affect real estate. So why don't I discuss this more here on the show. Well, I explained that to you a while ago. It gets divisive, and it rarely affects people as much as they think. And as you know, I avoid even using words like Democrat, Republican, left, right, conservative and liberal. And why do I do that? Because they are divisive terms. The problem isn't so much politics. It's when people get infected with the partisan mind virus. Yes, they put party over country. For example, a partisan political instigator will swear to god that the economy is great now, but as soon as, say, a different party wins an election, even if the economy is the same, although now say that that same economy is awful. In fact, a couple years ago, I quit my job as a writer for a publication that you've heard of before. I no longer contribute to them. They put party before country, in my opinion, I wrote an article for them about two years ago, and my article made it sound like an eminent recession was a question, not a foregone conclusion. Well, the editor let me know that their consensus of writers feels like a recession is eminent and that I need to change my article to reflect that that's because they don't like the administration that's in power, so I quit rather than edit my article. I mean, if you just ask an American the question, this question, do you wish that America were less divided? Well. Any sane person would answer that question, yes. Well, then why would you go attach divisive labels to the other side and attack them? It makes no sense. That's where the division comes from. So really, it ought to be about solutions and ideologies and not political parties. So this is another reason why, during political season, I don't play those games, and we stick to investing the economy and wealth mindset. I mean, virtually no other country in the world drags out their presidential election cycle this long. I mean, it's like a year and a half. Remember all those debates last year and names like Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy that were in the news all the time. I mean, other countries get this entire process over with in six weeks. Let's take a page from them, and that way we can have more constructive things in our news cycle. Well, I am coming to you from the makeshift mobile GRE studio today, like I do some weeks, because this morning, I woke up in reading Pennsylvania. Reading is, in fact, my birthplace, and besides being the pretzel capital of the United States, one way that you know about reading is from the Reading Railroad property in the board game Monopoly. Yeah, it's one of the properties that you can buy and, I guess, collect rent on. And, you know, here we are a real estate show. So maybe it's appropriate that the namesake of my birthplace is immortalized as a property on America's best known real estate game. And it also might be appropriate that I'm back here because the 10th anniversary of the launch of this show is nigh this coming Thursday, on October 10, 1010, it will be 10 years since episode one of this show. And yes, the math, I suppose, checks out, because there are about 52 weeks in a year, and you are listening to episode 522, right now. Well, listen to this. This could blow your mind. Have you heard an AI generated podcast? And I don't just mean sort of where a robot reads a blog in monotone and then you listen to that audio file that's embedded in the article. No, that's not what I'm talking about. Here's what I mean. A few weeks ago, I learned that macroeconomist Richard Duncan, who was the first ever guest on this show back in 2014 Gosh, all these tie ins to GRE 's origins today? Well, Richard published some PDF charts, and he uploaded them to notebooklm.google.com, that's how you find this. And he clicked generate audio overview, and within three minutes, it had created a podcast with two virtual people having this pretty intelligent, engaging and even humorous conversation about his presentation on interest rates. I mean, wow, just listen to the first minute or minute and a half of this AI generated podcast here. And again, this is from about a month ago. So they're talking about the upcoming Fed rate cut that did indeed happen.
13:23
All right, ready to dive in. Today, we're tackling the big question everyone wants to know, will the Fed actually cut rates on September 18? It's the question on everyone's mind, for sure, and more importantly, for our listeners, what's it going to mean for them to help us unpack this whole thing. We're looking at this report. It's by economist Richard Duncan, called why the Fed will cut September 12, 2024. Duncan always brings unique perspective. He cuts right to the chase, which I appreciate. right! So let's jump right in. Duncan starts by talking about inflation, which, let's face it, we've all been feeling the heat from this past year. Yeah, it's been a wild ride. Inflation hit a pretty brutal 9% last year. I think my grocery bills are still recovering. Oh yeah, tell me about it. But the latest number shows down to 2.5% that's both by the CPI and importantly, the PCE Price Index, right? And that PCE is the one the Fed really keeps their eye on, exactly, which is why I wanted to ask you about that. Why is the PCE like the golden child for the Fed, why not just stick with the CPI? Everyone knows that one. well, It's all about getting the most accurate picture of inflation. Think of it like this. The CPI is like taking a quick glance at prices. You know, just a snapshot in time. Okay with you, but the PCE, that's more like a movie. It captures how our spending habits change as prices change, and that gives the fed a better look at those underlying trends driving inflation. So it's like the CPI with a little bit of a crystal ball. It's trying to anticipate what's going to happen. It's got it okay? So inflation seems to be cooling down, which is good news, right?
Keith Weinhold 14:56
Gosh, that's just really good, a totally realistic sounding AI generated podcast just from some PDF files. The macro economist Richard Duncan uploaded remarkable and you know that the quality of that is only going to get better. That's probably about as bad as it's ever going to be right there. And in fact, in another 10 years, listeners could find it rather cute or quaint that we find this remarkable today. A big thanks to Richard Duncan for allowing us to play that and also expect Richard to be back here with us on the show again before the year ends, and here on the 10th anniversary week of the GRE podcast, you know, it makes me wonder how expendable my job as podcast host is going to be. I hope that I'm here with you in another 10 years, and I completely plan to be. Well episode number one of the get rich education podcast back from 2014 is called your abundance mindset. So it's apropos to visit a mindset topic today I'm going to do that with firebrand Speaker This week's guest, Garrett Gunderson. Here shortly, do you want to live a life that is small and safe and sheltered? I doubt that you really do, but you know, safe decision after safe decision, that's what most people end up doing. Do you want your kids to live a small, safe, sheltered life? I mean, most parents want safety for their children, but they're going to have an outsized impact on others when they study and then take the right risks. We're discussing those types of wealth creation mindsets with Garrett. He's a really talented guy. He was last with us six years ago. He's done some stand up comedy. Many have remarked that Garrett looks like Jesus Christ. He's the author of some popular books, including killing sacred cows. Let's talk to Garrett. This week's guest is a pretty well known author and speaker. He helps you make, keep and grow your money to help you live your best life. He's an especially dynamic speaker, public speaker, and I'm confident that you'll be able to hear that on the show today, because he has a great knowledge base, and he speaks with this conviction on topics that make him so compelling. Hey, it's been a few years. Welcome back to GRE Garrett Gunderson.
Garrett Gunderson 17:38
good to be back. I thought that was a very honest, like, pretty well known, like, I'm not really well known pretty well. That's just enough to annoy my wife. Like, I'll be going through an airport and someone come over and talk to me, and she's like, ah, but I love it, dude. I love conversations with people that I don't know, and I just get to meet because if they engage in my work, it gives us a chance to connect. And sometimes it makes me look cool to my kids, which is always a good thing. You know what I'm saying, like my son will be with me and someone say, hey, love killing sacred cows, or, Hey, are you that guy on YouTube? I'm like, it could be me, or you might be thinking, I'm Jesus. You know what I'm saying. I look familiar, though.
Keith Weinhold 18:14
Yeah. Now you can tell your kids that I said you are pretty well known. And you know, Garrett, you're also a really keen and perceptive person. You can tell if somebody's poor within 60 seconds of what they say. Tell us about that.
Garrett Gunderson 18:31
Oh, man, that video has so much hate. Man. I put that out like it was my son's filming, and I'm just sitting in our kitchen, and I was just thinking about a conversation I had earlier that day, and in the conversation, it was like, more about complaining about the world, saying that they couldn't afford things, saying they didn't have the time, blaming everyone for their situation. And I was like, man, it's pretty easy to tell. And 60 seconds, I mean, I guess maybe is a rash statement, because maybe it takes three minutes or 300 seconds, like five minutes, and get deep enough, but you just find that there's a certain language to poverty, and whether that's just poor in spirit, whether it's poor in mind, or whether it's poor in the bank account, typically it's devoid of personal responsibility. It's leading the levels of inspiration. And this isn't to say that if you're wealthy, that you only speak inspiring conversations. I mean, I complain sometimes that happens. I get frustrated. I get disappointed in myself for not being nicer to a customer service person and like, have to really manage that sometimes. But ultimately, it's this language that is almost like a Marxist type of language, you know, that comes from a place of like, I want this. I'm owed that we deserve this. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, like, who's going to produce that? And so it's something that's a fairly easy thing to detect with just a few questions. Like, if I'm given one question, I can tell in 60 seconds for sure.
Keith Weinhold 19:57
Yeah. I think a lot of times people start complaining. About something. People find money a scarce resource when they start, you know, complaining about gas prices or something like that, I think that's just really a classic one. It tells me where they're coming from. I mean, it tells me what their mind is occupying.
Garrett Gunderson 20:12
Right. And if we're not excited about our future, if we're not developing our skill sets, if we're not really engaged in the world of value creation, it's easy to get frustrated about tax it's easier to get frustrated about inflation. It's easier to get complaining about interest rates or loan rates and all those kind of things. But what I find is the best way to outpace inflation is through skill set, and if we truly invest in ourselves and invest in other people so that we increase our quality of life and our enjoyment of it along the way, we increase all the skill sets that matter. You've mentioned that I'm a decent public speaker and that I'm articulate. That comes from going through writing courses and hiring speaking coaches and just getting the reps and doing comedy and the things that will help me to become a more effective communicator. And then it's really about becoming a better cash flow investor. I know that you teach people a lot around, you know, real estate and investing, and that's one of the big three assets in my mind, that helps people generate and create cash flow. But most people are trapped in this indoctrination where they set money aside and forget it. They wait for 30 years and hope for the best. They're very one dimensional of just paying off a loan and then hoping the retirement plan is going to get them there. And that's why they end up in this mindset where they're like, oh, I don't feel in control, because the outcome of my income is something that's dictated by the economy and not my own willpower, not my own skill set, not my own value creation. And I think that's why retirement is such a bad and faulty notion. My main statement in life is create the life you don't want to retire from. Now, I get it. In the industrial age, people need to retire because they were being worked to death and they weren't living for very long. It was an immensely valuable concept back then, a blue to collar world back then? Yeah, right. But in today's world, what if people just invested more time in selecting your career that mattered or had enough faith and took a leap on themselves to start becoming a better investor or start a business or be an entrepreneur where they get upside potential, instead of just begging for safety and security, instead of just wanting the entitlement of benefits, instead of just trading time for money, like that's an industrial age concept that we watched, whether it's our parents or grandparents, go through trading time for money, but we're in a world where that's not required any longer, because we do have technology, we do have artificial intelligence, we do have these things that are starting to displace The jobs that no one really wants to do because it beats down the body, and there's a lot of opportunity for those that are willing to grasp it and go for it, but it comes down to one key thing, value creation. And if we're going to be devoid of value creation, it's easy to tell in 60 seconds whether someone's poor because value creation was not part of their concept or their purview.
Keith Weinhold 22:40
And value creation is about expanding that upside. And a lot of poverty mindsets just complain about the downside their expenses. And you can't really do that much about your expenses. You can only lower them so much. Anytime you do, you're probably diminishing your quality of life anyway. And really, I think a lot of this mindset of lack Garrett comes back to the fact that, simply, most believe that money itself is a scarce resource. I probably believe that at one time, when I was younger, maybe you did too. And as I like to say, although I wasn't the first person that said it, the only place that you get money is from other people. So most people, which tend to be employees, think their way to increase their income is only if their employer gives them a raise, or maybe if they find a new employer that pays them maybe 10% more, or something like that. So they're limiting their upside over there because they think money's a scarce resource, because it's got to come from an employer. Somehow they're not thinking about, why don't you really expand your upside and start an Amazon business, or rent cars through Turo or Airbnb rentals, or what we do here at get risk education, help people with long term housing rentals. So it just kind of comes back to the fact that, you know, people's mind is closed off, and they just simply want to believe that money is a scarce resource.
Garrett Gunderson 23:57
They're adding to computer screens as we talk about this, you know, I mean, there's never been more money in the world than there is today. It's the most money there's ever been. We keep adding it. There's, you know, so much of it out there. But even if they stopped printing it, or they stopped adding it to balance sheets, there's an infinite number of times they can exchange hands. So if we use it to buy computers and clothes or food and shelter or entertainment like comedy and concerts, the more times money exchanges hands, the more values created. It's exchange that facilitates and creates wealth in the way that we create exchanges, serving others, solving problems and adding value. And here's the deal, we can have two parties do exchange with one another and both end up wealthier. It doesn't need to be a win, lose transaction. As a matter of fact, when people transact, they agree that what they bought was worth more than their money, or if they sold it, they agree that the money was more than what they sold. Otherwise they would have kept it. We don't do equal exchange. I wouldn't give you $1 for $1 right? There's no reason to exchange. It's unequal, which means, if you can provide something more efficiently than. I can for myself. I can pay you, which frees up my time to do what I most efficiently and effectively can do. I did triathlons because I was an idiot back in the day. Sorry for those triathletes, which is like a lot of work, man. And I don't love swimming, but I remember going to buy a triathlon bike. I just bought, like, a road bike. It was a big upgrade from having a huffy from Walmart, you know, like, oh, this $4,700 this is a while back, but it was carbon fiber. It was, like, amazing. And I thought, you know, I could never build this. So this $4,700 is actually really cheap, because I'm giving him $4,700 to build something that I can then go build something like write a book or do some consulting or do a speech that can inspire someone. And so that exchange was valuable. It's like if you bought killing cigarette cows. For me, you're saying that it was worth more than $20 I'm saying it was worth less because I already have the knowledge in my head, and so we both can end up wealthier. Unequal exchange is what facilitates wealth. What it lets us do is tap into our best abilities and tap into other people's best abilities. And that exchange ends up growing over time, and the more times money circulates because of Good Services and experiences, the more output there is. So look at today. Hundreds of years ago, if you wanted to listen to music, you had to hire a quartet. Now it's free for almost anyone, if you have any device of any sort, if you're willing to listen to a commercial here or there, you can listen to anything that you want. For the most part, you don't even have to pay for it. So think about that advancement. If you want to be anywhere in the world, you could be there in almost 24 hours or less, back in the day, that would have taken, you know, years for that matter. I mean, we have so much more wealth because we keep building upon previous wealth, previous ideas, and those blueprints we continue to grow from with new innovation and ingenuity. Therefore, the quality of life for someone that's middle class today is infinitely more than the middle class of hundreds of years ago, the amount of people that are hungry today versus years ago, even though we have more than 8 billion people on the planet, has gone down as a percentage, not up as a percentage. That's because of velocity and exchange. It's because of this notion that money's not scarce and resources have the way to be replenished, as long as we're stewards. Now, if the bison, if we kill too many of them, then they can't replenish, right? But if we manage that properly, you could actually eat the bison, use the skins, do all that kind of stuff, and still have that exist in the future. These people that don't believe in that believe that there's like a finite pie, that if one thing's gone, it's gone forever, not understanding value exchange, reproduction, apparently, and basic science either. And again, we can overdo those things and damage an ecosystem. So there is a balance.
Keith Weinhold 27:36
Yeah, that's right, when you talk about value creation, then you're really not talking about a person going out and trying to get their piece of the pie. Really more accurately what you're talking about. Here are ideas for expanding the entire pie.
Garrett Gunderson 27:51
Spam the pie. Expand your means you can budget and reduce. You said it eloquently. You said, Hey, there's only so much you can do in reduction of expenses before it just starts infringing and taking away from things that you value in life. There's a finite game there, but the expansion gain through co creation, through collaboration, instead of through competition, is absolutely an infinite pie that continues to grow as we add more value, as we serve more people, as we solve bigger problems, as we more deeply impact the people that we impact as we reach more people, these are things that can lead to more dollars. So I have this thing called the value equation. It's our mental capital, ideas, knowledge, wisdom, insights, strategies and tools multiplied by our relationship capital, people, networks, organizations, communities, friends, family, mentors, equals our financial capital. So financial capital is a byproduct of our stewardship of our mental and relationship capital. And the bridge between mental relationship capital is what we call business, or we call investing. So ultimately, Money Follows value. How do we add more value? Have a better idea. Impact more people. More more deeply. Impact the people you currently serve. Collaborate and offer more like it's an infinite pie and an infinite game. If we play it that way. We're talking with speaker and author Garrett Gunderson, about the mindset of wealth creation. More. We come back with Garrett. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold.
Keith Weinhold 29:01
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Hal Elrod 30:54
this is Hal Elrod author of The Miracle Morning and listen to get it rich. Education with Keith Weinhold, and don't quit your Daydream.
Keith Weinhold 31:10
welcome back to get rich education. We're talking with firebrand speaker and author Garrett Gunderson. You can learn more about him at Garrettgunderson.com. Garrett before the break, we were talking about the mindset in opening up one in order to create more wealth over time. Here, a lot of times, one way we talk about that is, don't just get your money to work for you. Get other people's money to work for you. You could actually use other people's money ethically three ways at the same time, in real estate, using the tenant's money for the income stream the government's money for generous tax incentives, and then the bank's money for the leverage, which is actually a greater wealth building force than compound interest. That's one example of how we do that here. But when one has become successful, oftentimes they want to make sure that that's lasting. They want to build a legacy, something that they can carry on. And I know you articulate that through the Rockefeller method. So do you want to tell us more about that?
Garrett Gunderson 32:05
I wrote this book. What would the Rockefellers do back in 2016 this study between really wealthy families versus their wealth lasted, versus wealthy families that decimated it, and the best study was really the Vanderbilt because they had more money than the US Treasury. One the railroad family, yeah, transportation. And you know what? They destroyed that Cornelius died, and then his eldest son doubled the estate nine years and then he died, and that was the last time their estate grew. It started to decrease after that. And 54 years later, the first Vanderbilt died broke, and so the last Vanderbilt family union didn't have any millionaires at it. I know everybody knows about like Vanderbilt University. They donated like, a million dollars to get that started. But, you know, that was pretty inconsequential compared to their overall net worth. But they didn't have a formula or format to create sustainable wealth. They own 10 mansions in in Manhattan. They don't own those anymore. They own the breakers in Rhode Island. The state of Rhode Island owns that now. So they lost this massive amount of wealth where the Rockefellers are just entering their seventh generation of passing on, well, seven generations, wow. And people that worked for the rock bellers, like the executives, they're still passing on, well, for this generation after generation. And most people don't make it past the third generation. And we could look at, you know, people like Walt Disney. We could look at people like JCPenney. We could look at people, you know, like the the Kennedy family and so many others that have used these two things to really create sustainable wealth. Number one is they use trust. The Rockefellers coined the term own nothing and control everything, whether that's a revocable living trust for people who are just starting out and don't have a substantial amount of wealth, or a domestic asset protection trust for those that have a decent amount of wealth, those are the two main popular ones. There are some offshore trusts. It gets onerous and complicated once you go offshore, but it does protect your assets. The second piece is using whole life insurance, so they have this death benefit that's on the insured, and they put that on their heirs, so that every time an heir dies, it replenishes the trust, and potentially even grows it, because there's these threats to the family wealth, there's taxes, there's inflation, there's interest rate fluctuations or market, you know, economic turmoil. So what they're doing is they're creating that level of stability, and they give them preferred interest rates to borrow from the trust versus a bank. So now your family can actually earn interest instead of paying interest. And yes, if your family is paying interest, they're paying it back to their future generation at Preferred rates. And so you could be one generation away from never needing a bank again and actually being able to capitalize on deals a whole lot faster. Specifically, we use whole life, because it transfers the risk to the insurance company. There's six or seven companies that are participating, mutual companies that have been around for over 150 years, always paid dividends. It protects your cash value from taxes. It protects it from liability and bankruptcy in over 40 states, fully and partially in every state. So what happens is, for an asset allocation decision. You can start moving some of your fixed income portfolio to this and have a better, more robust benefits type of situation, and then actually start to implement this Rockefeller method so that you can create generational wealth.
Keith Weinhold 35:12
All right, so the Rockefeller method using trusts and whole life insurance to preserve and grow your wealth, so as one's building their portfolio, amassing wealth, increasing income streams as they go along in their investor journey. Is there anything that they should keep in mind as they try to integrate some of these things from the Rockefellers?
Garrett Gunderson 35:12
Yeah, a lot of other insurance people try to sell these index universal life policies, but those won't work because they have too many levers of risk, and especially when you're building cash value, you might use that cash value to buy real estate. Then you might use the rental income to put the money back into the policy so you can buy more real estate in the future. So it becomes like a medium storage shed or unit for your cash that's protected, but now it comes with the death benefit, which, here's one example, for a real estate investor, instead of just, you know, rolling it over to the next property and rolling it over to the next property when you eventually sell, you can use a charitable trust. And a charitable trust, you can donate that highly appreciated piece of real estate, get a partial tax deduction, sell it and fund the trust and pay zero tax on your gains. No matter what your basis is, there's no tax on the gains. You're the first beneficiary of the trust, meaning you can take an income between 5% and 50% from the trust while you're alive, depending on the underlying assets, and then when you die, the charity keeps whatever's left over. But if you have a life insurance policy that will replenish what that donation was, therefore giving you 20 30% or more increased cash flow with an asset by making a synergistic allocation. Now, that's a lot of information in a short period of time, but it's more about planting seeds. And don't worry, I'll give everybody a copy of the book at no charge, so they can kind of read it at their own pace, or you can listen to it at their own pace, versus me condensing it into just a couple minutes.
Keith Weinhold 36:56
Oh, thanks. All right, well, we'll learn more about that resource at the end that sounds like that can be really helpful to a lot of people. And I guess Garrett, even though you're not as real estate ish as me, as we wind down here, you know, I think the place that you and I find the most common ground is we often say and help people with the things that sort of fly in the face of conventional guidance. I mean, you really just don't have to think about it that much more than if you just do normal stuff, average, mediocre stuff, you're only going to have a normal, average, mediocre outcome. So can you tell us about any last things that can help get people thinking differently and debunk some of this conventional guidance that really will never help get you much above lower middle class?
Garrett Gunderson 37:40
Yeah, if you're putting your money in mutual funds and ETFs, you're making a bunch of other people money. I mean, the big three is you want to focus on generating cash flow so you can create financial independence. Because if you have enough cash flow from assets to cover your expenses, every active dollar can build more assets. That's an exponential benefit to you. So now that you don't have to be forced to work, you've got a lot more freedom. And the big three for me are real estate businesses or intellectual property, which is kind of, you know, something that is part of business to a degree, but I consider a different asset class. Those are the big three. I have no money in the stock market. I have money in my businesses. I invest in myself. I invest in my vision. I invest in a team, instead of investing in things that I have no control over and I don't get cash flow from and that the economy can change, or that Wall Street's making money on whether I make money or not. So that's just one notion that I think we could probably, you know, agree, flies in the face of what everybody's teaching. That's the masses. But when you look at the wealthiest people, it's how they're implementing and what they're doing.
Keith Weinhold 38:39
And I think another place that conventional guidance really tells people to prioritize is paying down debt or paying off debt. I mean, making your debt free scream at age 34 you know, maybe that's not so bad, but maybe not. I mean, did paying down low to moderate interest rate debt and making that priority sacrifice your lifestyle and your family's lifestyle the entire time while you were doing it, and did it have a steeper opportunity cost, because you were not investing those dollars in things that can earn a greater return than their interest rates were they're using some of the vehicles that you talked about. So, you know, I guess what I'm getting at Garrett philosophically, one way I said it, is that the risk of delayed gratification is denied gratification?
Garrett Gunderson 39:23
Yeah, I mean, if we become sacrifice, how do we ever overcome that habit? I'm I'm scrimping, I'm sacrificing, yeah, I'm deferring. And then one day, what you're supposed to flip the switch be like, Okay, now I'm abundant. I'm gonna enjoy this money that doesn't happen. So that habitual notion of reduce, cut, eliminate, no one shrinks their way to wealth. It's a game of expansion and production. Yes, be efficient, be intelligent, be a steward, but don't become a miser, because misers, no matter how much money they have, never get to feel what it's like to live their richest life. It's always about elimination. Instead of enjoyment and utilization.
Keith Weinhold 40:02
Oh, that is just beautifully stated. I really can't say it any better than that, and that really brings it back full circle as to the best personal finance is probably growing your means rather than practicing living below your means for decades, and then you'll never get that time back. Well, Garrett, you've generated so many good educational resources. Why you've been the successful author and speaker. Tell us more about that.
Garrett Gunderson 40:26
Garrettgunderson.com is where a lot of those resources are. I write a blog like it's 2006 because I love to write and just get information out there. I've created a money persona quiz. So if you go forward slash tools on Garrettgunderson.com you can figure out what's the success or sabotage that happens subconsciously with how you deal with money. It's very informative and useful. I've written 10 books. I offered that if people DM me on Instagram, Garrett B, Gunderson, two R's, two T's, middle initial B and just say, Keith, get rich. Keith get rich. So I know it was on this program, I'll hook you up with the audio and a PDF of the book on me, so that you can hopefully just understand this Rockefeller method and improve your life and start building a legacy right now. Because if you're already doing real estate, that's great, let's make sure to preserve, protect and even perpetuate that wealth with some of the structures that could be integrated.
Keith Weinhold 41:17
Well Garrett, yeah, you have a lot of great resources and just a really wide spectrum of understanding of concepts all across a personal finance field. Is there any last thing you'd like to let our audience know about?
Garrett Gunderson 41:28
Just create the life you don't want to retire from. Design a life that you love. Create enough cash flow from assets to have that economic independence so you have choice and freedom daily of what you do and swing for the fences in that purpose, you know, that's probably the best advice that I could give.
Keith Weinhold 41:43
Why would you want to live your life any other way? Garrett Gunderson, it's been valuable as expected. Thanks so much for coming on to the show.
Garrett Gunderson 41:51
Thanks for having me.
Keith Weinhold 41:58
Yeah, a lot on both mindset and long term wealth preservation with Garrett Gunderson today, now, 15 weeks ago, on episode 507 you'll remember that episode called compound interest is weak, where I made a takedown about how compound Interest actually is not serving people. Leverage does serve people. Garrett also makes a takedown and critiques this myth about how people think compound interest builds wealth. A little review. There some comprehension from 15 weeks ago, compound interest has most people counting on the average annual return when they should be focused on the compound annual growth rate. A little review. Remember the average annual return means if you're up 10% one year and then down 10% next year that you broke even. That's the arithmetic thing. But that is a lie. The reality is in this CAGR, the compound annual growth rate, it reflects, if you're up 10% one year and then down 10% the next year, you're at minus 1% the geometric thing. And that's the reality, and that makes a retirement lifestyles worth of difference, and a retirement ages worth of difference like I thoroughly broke down for you in episode 507 coming up on the show here in future weeks, a familiar name like Tom wheelwright returns, and then new guests, like a former NFL player here on the show, if you want to reach out to Garrett Gunderson on Instagram for his best free resources, even the audio and pdf of his Rockefeller method of generational wealth preservation, again on Instagram, you can DM him at Garrett B Gunderson, he let me know later, all you have to do is send him my first name, Keith, and he will hook you up there. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold, and I am supremely grateful and even in awe of your devoted listenership for an entire decade of your life and mine, here's to another 10 years. Don't quit your Daydream.
44:21
Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively,
Keith Weinhold 44:49
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