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Before we begin, quick disclaimer.
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Nothing in this episode should be considered investment advice.
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Results discuss have not been independently vetted, any claims made by the guests have
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The content is for educational purposes only.
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These expressed by the guests do not reflect those of the host or the show.
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Imagine this for a second.
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You did everything right your entire life.
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You worked hard, climbed the ladder, earned six feet years, you told yourself I'm doing
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And then one day, at 63 years old, you get fired, no warning, no backup plan, and
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when you sit down and run the numbers, you realize something terrifying.
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You're only a couple years away from being broke.
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That's the moment today's guest, David Nassif, found himself in.
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And here's the part that should make all of us pause.
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David wasn't responsible, he wasn't reckless, he did what most hired owners do.
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He made good money, but he didn't realize, and what most people don't realize until
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it's too late, is that making money and building wealth are two completely different skills.
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In fact, most people, especially high income professionals, are unknowingly walking in financial
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surveys, thinking they're moving forward when they're actually ending up right where
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But David made a decision in that moment.
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No backup plan, no safety net, and over the next six years, he went from nearly broke
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to building a seven-figure portfolio and true financial freedom.
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Not by chasing trends, not by taking massive risks, but by following a simple, repeatable
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system that almost nobody talks about.
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So if you've ever wondered, am I actually on track, or am I just getting by, what would
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happen if my income disappeared tomorrow?
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Or is it already too late for me to fix this?
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This episode might completely change the way you think about money.
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Hey guys, welcome to an episode of the Financial Freedom Podcast.
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Today's guest is David Nassif from Arizona.
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He was fired at 63, nearly broke, and he became a millionaire by 69, safely.
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We're going to hear his story, turn around, really happy to have him on.
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Excited to be here with you in your audience.
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We'll dive into the questions.
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Well, it all happened when I was 63.
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I got fired after 18 years with the same company.
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I would not wish that day.
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Anyway, when I did the math, it was brutal.
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If we drained all of our savings, all of our retirement, we would be broke by 65.
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I'm thinking, who's going to hire me at my age?
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The hardest part was driving home.
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Thinking, how am I going to tell my wife, Mary?
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We didn't marry for 30 years.
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She did not deserve the mess I just threw our family into.
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After two months of dead-end job searching, I did not want to go back to the corporate world.
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They didn't want me back.
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My interview is none of them actually worked out.
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I decided I'd take a huge risk.
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I went to work as an independent sales agent on straight commission.
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No salary, no safety net, no benefits.
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The first month for brutal call calls, working mistakes, I heard more
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nose than I'd ever heard in my life, that too much period.
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Looking back, all that rejection, all that resistance I was getting, I believe it was
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giving me the mental muscles I needed to bust through that dark period of my life.
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Because after 10 months of grinding, I had an incredible milestone.
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I was suddenly making more money than my good paying corporate six-figure salary.
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For a moment, I thought, we made it, but then I realized, we haven't made anything.
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I've been making decent money.
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Most of the 40 years previous, look where I got me.
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I was on the edge of a financial cliff, and I said, I need to learn better how to invest.
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I need to better how to build wealth.
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It couldn't waste time with a bunch of investment theories.
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I dug down myself, read 21 books, listened to 13 podcasts consistently on financial
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planning, blogs, newsletters, every time I got a good idea, I'd put on a piece of paper,
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kept filling up that paper.
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When it was overflowing, I took out the least effective and kept the good ones, it kept
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getting more refined.
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It was a Senate and forget it approach.
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I did not have time.
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I had to run my company.
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Six years later, I did what I thought was impossible.
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From terrified of being broke to a seven-figure portfolio and a real financial freedom, I now
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know it is never too late to rewrite your story.
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If I can pull it off, starting as late as 63, anybody can with the right direction.
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I truly believe that.
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Your story reminded me a lot of the doctors approaching this cliff.
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They know that healthcare is broken, they can get laid off at any point.
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What were some of the things you did that accelerated?
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Did you become a millionaire over a six-year period or the things that gave you an age
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Let me just tell you the story about what inspired the whole thing, but I'll tell you
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Scientists at the Max Planck Institute did an experiment.
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They put people in the center of a dense German force and they told them, walk on a straight
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These were confident people, but when the clouds covered the sun and they lost their point
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of reference, the GPS tracking showed they were gradually starting to walk in circular
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Some of them were ending up right back where they began, yet every one of them was absolutely
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convinced they were walking in a perfectly straight line.
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That was me for 40 years.
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Working hard, thought I was doing the right thing, ultimately ending up right where I started.
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I said to myself, I need a simple one-page compass to keep me straight because shiny object
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or a hot tip and I was off to the races and another direction.
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I was going in circles, I didn't realize what I was doing.
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It made all the difference.
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I doubled my portfolio three times in a six-year period.
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Most financial experts would say, Dave, that's impossible to do that.
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I wasn't day training.
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I wasn't chasing crypto.
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I was doing something so boring.
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My approach was simple.
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The crazy part of it was when the market was down, I was thrilled.
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When other people were panic and unsettling, I was buying more shares of discount prices.
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My limit of regret was the market wasn't down more than that six-year period.
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I didn't even better.
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But here's what surprise me was the math.
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There's a thing called the rule of 72.
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It says that if you are getting a 10% return, your money will double every 7.2 years or roughly
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Once I've developed my compass, my first double occurred in 30 months.
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The second one, 13 months, the third, 29 months for an average of 24 months, way less than
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half the expected 86 month time period.
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But the secret wasn't the return.
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I was doing three simple things that I hadn't figured out 40 years previously.
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I was saving a good percent of my income.
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I knew my time was short.
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Secondly, I was getting in the right investments.
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For me, low-cost index funds, super cheap, and I only went to one of them as every stock
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in the United States, public-ish rated, and the other fund is every stock outside the
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So for me to go broke, to go to zero, the entire economic world system would have to collapse
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I can sleep at night.
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There's not a high risk approach.
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I used market volatility to work for me instead of against me.
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I was caught in this trap of buy high and sell low, because that's just the psychology
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of how the weird we people think, it's funny, if you were to go to the department store and
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they had a sale, 50% off, you wouldn't say, hey, no, I'm not paying a 50%.
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I want a full retail.
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But yet, on the stock market, we all panic, oh, 50% off.
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We don't want to buy it.
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Then we want to get, so I got my mind in the right thinking.
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I was able to go my wealth twice as fast with half the risk compared to how I've been
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If this episode is making you rethink how your income is structured, that's intentional.
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Information doesn't create freedom.
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At the end of this episode, I'm going to show you how to diagnose whether you're building
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leverage or just scaling complexity.
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Let's get back into it.
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During times April of last year, even this year, market has been quite frankly poor performance.
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What do you do when you were in this situation you bought and your portfolio is down?
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How did you handle that?
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It's weird, because of the education, Benjamin Franklin said, education acknowledges the
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It was that way with me.
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Once I understood the market, once I understood buying low, instead of buying high, I actually
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was through every morning.
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I don't listen to the news, the cable news financial stuff.
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I would never take advice.
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They don't know what they're talking.
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Half the time they're wrong, half the time they're not with them.
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I like to see what the market's doing.
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I love their stories about the different companies.
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Once I understood it, when the market was down, I had the best breakfast that morning,
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because I was so thrilled.
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When I buy this month, I only bought once or twice a month, because I didn't market
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I tried that and it wasn't nightmare.
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I look at it as sale prices.
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I'm happy right now.
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A lot of people are down about the market.
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I just opened stays down.
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As long as I'm in a buying mode, once I retire, maybe I might think you will be a little
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It's like I'm buying it.
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I want it to stay down.
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Do you handle this fact that you are 63, fired, no income, no prospects, and you have
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How did you handle that?
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A lot of people, they see themselves, they're like, it's hopeless.
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How did you view that situation?
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I'll be honest with you.
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My first two months, I was those people who said it's hopeless.
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How am I going to recover?
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It was like, you are no value to us anymore.
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Companies I was in with were saying the same thing.
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For two months, I was like, wow, this is not working.
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I could be another statistic.
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My family, my wife doesn't deserve this.
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I'm going to make this work somehow.
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When I did this, started my own company, it was miserable those first few months, but
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I just says, there's no plan B.
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I didn't have a backup plan.
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I didn't have the option I had to make this work.
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I look back on it now, and I am so grateful I got fired.
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My life is so much better financially.
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I should send a fruit basket and a thank you letter to those people that fired me, because
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I didn't have the guts to quit.
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I should have quit eight years before I was with the company 18 years.
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Who in their late 50s making six figures just quit.
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So you don't do that.
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So I couldn't do it.
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They gave me the push I needed out of the company.
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I can feel sorry for myself.
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I can play the victim role or I can fight.
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My wife is worth it.
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I'm not going to let this happen to us.
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Looking back, what are some of the things you wish you had done while in your corporate
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job to soften this landing of getting fired at 63?
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Let me say, I'm grateful what happened that way.
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If I wasn't desperate, I wouldn't be where I am today.
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I needed that inspiration.
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Looking back, if I was a normal person, I would have done my wealth compass.
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It's nine trail markers.
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I would have just thought on that thing and stayed on it.
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If I had done that at my 50s, forget the 20s and 30s, I would have been just fine.
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What I did in six years with my compass is more than I did 40 years before that.
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That's what I wish I did.
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I wish somebody else had thought of the compass and got a hold of it.
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And I just followed it.
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It's a step by step process.
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I made it for the non-financial person to be able to use it.
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People in two mental states that you are where you are today, you implemented over six
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years, you were able to pull yourself out.
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A lot of people get bitter or angry at the past.
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If I had done this, if I had started in my 30s or 20s, how do you handle that?
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With gratitude, I am just so grateful where I met my first three doubles.
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My last double was the seven figure double.
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It happened in 28 months.
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I'm on my fifth double.
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It's going to put me numbers that I've never seen before.
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Growth is exponential.
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Once you get the market kicking, in the beginning, my contributions were being the big
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Now, the market has taken over and it's really grown for me.
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A lot of people have this misunderstanding about high income people.
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You have a lot of listeners who are high income.
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I was high income most of my 40 years, you never know it at 63.
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Let me share with you some interesting stats that will help people understand this.
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The NBA, an average player, makes over $10 million a year.
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But five years after retirement, 60% of them are broke according to the Netflix documentary
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The NFL is even worse.
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After two years of retirement, 78% of them are either bankrupt or in serious financial
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stress, according to sports illustrated, 25% of medical doctors in their 60s have not
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gotten beyond a six figure net worth.
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They've made a third of a million dollars most of their life.
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Here they are in their 60s and don't even have a seven figure situation.
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Here they are to Dale Schroeder, a basketball-loving carpenter who made modest to below average
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income his entire life.
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He chose to live on less of the earned and invests a difference wisely.
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He ended up with a $3 million portfolio.
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That's more than the most NBA and NFL players making their $10 million.
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Here's what I found out after I did my compass and woke up after 40 years of being asleep,
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making money is different than building wealth.
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I thought because I was a six figure earn a good portion of my life, I knew all about
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I knew how to make money, but I didn't know how to build wealth.
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Basketball players and footballers, I knew how to make money.
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Most of them are terrible at building wealth.
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Dale Schroeder allows me to make you money, but it was a master at building wealth.
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Two separate skill sets.
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One does not mean at all.
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You have the other one.
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They're completely different, I discovered it.
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I love how you distinguish between rich and wealth.
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We call them Henry's.
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They basically spend all their money and all of them save their invests.
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Henry's high income, not yet rich.
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One of my clients the other day, he was talking about how the market's down economy's
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bad, oil prices, then he's looking at Elon Musk is going to take a SpaceX public looking
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at the billionaires and watching the politicians make money.
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How do you handle comparison trap?
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I truly believe that comparison is a thief of joy.
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I decided I'm only going to carry myself to me.
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I could look and say, man, if I had this system, when I was in my 20s, I'd probably have
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a hundred million dollars at this point.
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I don't think that way.
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I am so grateful for what I got.
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I'm sure there are people doing much better than me, people who are worse than me.
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I don't get involved.
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I don't want that to drain my brain.
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That's why I like my investment approach of the Senate and forget it, deal.
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I don't have to worry.
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If he starts another company, I'll own a piece of it because part of my portfolio is
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I don't have to use energy to do that.
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Thanks for the energy.
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To generating the income I need to pour even more money into the market in a super safe
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That's where I like to focus my energy.
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I cannot control the market.
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I can't control anything.
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I can't control my ability to have a shovel to keep putting it into the market in a super
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That has proven so much more successful for me than worried about everyone else's situation
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if I cannot control it.
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Rapping up a lot of people are having trouble finding jobs, getting laid off.
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What's wrong with conventional thinking these days?
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Let me show you quickly.
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I'm going to give this to all your listeners who are free.
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I have a one-page wealth company that has nine trail markers.
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If everybody would, where am I at on these nine trail markers?
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Maybe I have a career problem or income as an issue right now.
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Maybe I'm a doctor.
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I income is great, but I have a debt issue with credit cards or maybe I have a wealth
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Pick up where you're at on this list and go forward.
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This will get you the most direct path to financial freedom.
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The other side is five North Star principals.
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Have you ever had a situation where you were doing something right and then you got distracted
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by the shiny object or the hot tip.
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This keeps you pulled you back so you don't do that.
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Saying you're on this step, the wealth accumulation, you go, I'm on more details.
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This is the ground game.
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Go to chapter six in the book.
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It will give you the details.
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Take it right at the light.
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This is a 30,000 foot view.
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This is the ground game right here.
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You bring those two together.
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It gets rid of so much noise.
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You have to clear path.
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It gives you peace.
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And my mind isn't full of, oh, this is going on.
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I got direction of peace.
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That's all about peace of mind.
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How can people connect with you and get that one sheet, check out your book and connect
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What you're going to see is download your free one page, one cup of this is one piece
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It's not complicated.
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If you like it, you can get a link to the Amazon book.
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It's very inexpensive.
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They go hand in hand.
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My company had a record your last year.
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I'm not doing this for money.
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I was in the dark storm and I did know what was going to happen.
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I was handed a lifeline by inspiration through this compass.
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I feel like the ultimate selfishness is not to share it.
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That's all I'm here for.
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To share the compass.
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Hopefully other people won't be 63 and waking up.
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It'd be much better if you're 53 or 43 or even 33 like that.
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Thank you so much for sharing your inspirational story and message.
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It's been a pleasure being here with you today.
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If you're a physician, founder or high-income professional and you feel like you're
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working harder every year, but not structurally freer, you're not alone.
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The mistake is an effort.
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This show exists to help you convert expertise into scalable leverage faster and
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with fewer expensive mistakes.
16:32
Here's the diagnostic I mentioned before.
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If your income requires your constant presence, if your capital isn't compounding outside
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your profession, if your highest value talent is doing low-value tasks, you don't have a
16:46
You have a leverage design problem.
16:49
And if you want to fix it with clarity instead of guesswork, I offer a limited number
16:53
of one-on-one leverage strategy sessions each month.
16:57
We audit your income model, capital deployment, authority positioning and structural bottlenecks
17:03
and design your highest return move.
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If you're serious about compressing years into months, the link to apply is below.