His Wealth Exploded When He Stopped Chasing Higher Returns | Dave Mozeika

0:00Americans don't have a savings rate problem because if you look at the research, Americans only are saving 4% of their income, but we found that they have a flow of funds problem. You four go on pretty much over $13 million dollars just by only saving 5%. Just by changing that, unconscious savings has you at $2.8 million dollars well. As incomes go up, spending runs in parallel, that's how you end up with lifestyle creep. I care more about compound cash flow than I do about compound interest. You're gamifying living paycheck to paycheck when you're not living paycheck to paycheck. Caleb, do you want to spend this money or do you want to go create one of those engines we were talking about? The world is designed to take money away from us. What if we could live the life you're living today, not take any additional risk, not have to change my lifestyle, but actually just control, put a mechanism in place that controls the gap between your money coming in and money going out through time. Dave and Zika, how are we doing? It's been a couple of years in the making. Welcome to the Better World Show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. You're speaking at the leap event. I have the pleasure of speaking here. And so we finally are in the same room. We're like, you know what? We probably should do a podcast. Yeah, why not?

1:00You are, I'm trying to think about how to introduce you. You're an entrepreneur, you're an innovator, you're changing the way that people are saving money. And you're going to walk through the whole process of how people can say it better. Your primary message is to help financial professionals. Absolutely. Use these tools that you've created and developed to help their clients save more money. And that makes everything better. What I also love about you is you have a high appreciation for life insurance. And I believe life insurance is one of the assets that actually helped make this tool possible. Because you practice what you preach from a standpoint of being a foundational asset. Listen, I was going to say that I believe that it is impossible to reach your full financial potential without the acquisition of whole life insurance. I love it. I love it. We'll definitely drive into that and talk more about that here in our conversation. But Dave, why don't you just give me a 30,000-foot view of what current is? So, current is a structural solution to how you manage the flow of your cash flow in your life.

2:02We're a technology platform and we're a community of people that's made up between what we call members, which are the users and every day Americans that are using our platform, they're collaborating with their financial professionals, which is what we call strategists. So, when you look at the platform, the members get a mobile application where they can see all the key metrics where they are right now all related to their cash flow. They're also connected to their strategists where they can call their strategists, email them, schedule appointments right through the mobile app and hit up customer support. I would say the most powerful feature of current is the control panel. The members are allowed to or able to connect all of their bank accounts to all of their assets and actually decide which or choose how much money is going where to create the effect of what the structural solution that is current. And of course, we give you guys really great insights as to the progress, the momentum that we're creating around cash flow. And you call this the dashboard? I call this the mobile app for the member app. What I would call

3:04the dashboard would be for strategists. I see. Where the strategists have a desktop version where they can manage an entire population of their clients, they're connected, they're seeing the same metrics, it just creates really incredible insights and interaction between the two, between the strategists and their clients. And they can obviously see client level data, their momentum, flow charts and just it allows somebody to be a cash flow strategist. We're putting people in the income under management business. Awesome. I love that income. And that's what your events all about. Our date before we go into some of the first principles you're drawing, some frameworks. I want to hear a little bit of your backstory of like how in the world did you get into even creating currents? I know that you're you were in the financial world. You're still in the financial world. Your big fan of life insurance, your passion about helping people track their cash flow. I want to know the origin story. Sure. I literally graduated college on a Friday and I was a life insurance agent the following Monday. We needed T-Share. And it's really the only thing that I know. Like I've never filled out a resume. I've never produced a resume. I've never been on a job interview. Most

4:06people in our industry are recruited in and I got recruited in junior and college. I already knew what I was going to do. Up into that point, I thought I was going to go work for my father and you know, and I got introduced to the industry like so many of us have. And I said, you know what? Let me go see what I'm worth on my own before I ride my father's co-tales. And I did it and I never looked back. So okay. So you got into space. I'm assuming you had a strong mentor. Tell me about learning about life insurance, the investing world, and then part of what you learned through leap and all. And I want you to unpack that is what made you really go all into currents? Yeah. I've been surrounded. I've been fortunate enough to have been surrounded by some of the most brilliant minds in the industry. And I think that is, I don't know, maybe I'm just lucky. And I think it's luck. And then you think you make your own luck, but I just happen to get lucky to be surrounded by, again, some of the most brilliant minds. And early in my career, it was, you know, I was like leaning into just being a life insurance agent. Like I thought I was going to be this, you know, buttoned up financial plan. I got into life insurance

5:09industry and I fell in love with it because, you know, protection is everything. You know, there's so many things that can go wrong in our lives. And, you know, building wealth is just as much about avoiding loss as it is finding gain. And I think all too often most people in the financial services world just avoid the protection conversation. And so that's how I was born in. But during my training, I was trained in macroeconomics. And which is economics, you're really the science of efficiency. It's a science of money. Like we're always looking at, you know, in economics, like how do I take a finite amount of money because money is finite and create as much as possible with it? Or if I know that the outcome I want, how do I use the least amount of resources to get there? So we're always been studying that. And as a part of that, we were always looking into cash flows and as well as some of the behavioral sides of money as well that really, you know, hurt people financially. Like people in just in general, we as humans have bad habits.

6:10And so through my training with leaps systems, where I was trained at a high level of on macroeconomics and protection and how to use the same dollar more than once, that turned into me creating a cash flow process in the probably the furt, you know, around the half, half point of my career. And what we learned was that Americans don't have a savings rate problem because if you'd look at the research, Americans only are saving 4% of the income, what we found is they have a flow of funds problem. So one of the things that we did and where currents was born to answer your question, one, take all the education that I got that I think is the best education that you could possibly get in the financial services industry coupled with the flow of funds and looking at cash flows. And one of the things we did was we figured out that we need to separate your wealth creation and protection money from your data to the day spending money. And that's not a new concept. But what we did was we created what we call a cash flow reservoir that becomes the entry point to your personal balance sheet. And what we figured out is that when people make money and they

7:14send it to their checking account, it promotes overconsumption because your checking account is designed to spend money in pay bills. What we figured out was why don't we put all of our savings into a bucket so we're saving all of our money and then we're choosing how much money we're letting go into the checking account. And once we did that, the results that I was having with my clients, their savings rates exploded, their lifestyles started expanding, their trajectory, their financial lives were improving radically. My production as a producer was improving radically. And as a result of that, we realized that we just need to make this available and make it a thing because it didn't exist. Yes. And so there was no technology, there was no way to get the metrics that we needed to help out. Understand the behavior. And there was manual ways to set this all up, but it wasn't, there was no way for a strategist to necessarily see what's going on help you. And then unless you're like crazy, crazy discipline and someone like yourself, it's not, it's not easy. And one of the

8:15things that you're doing is you're looking at how do we make this unconscious, like make it where it's just like boom, automated. And so that's where currents was really. Mooseborne. 100%. No, what I would like to transition to next is you talk about this, there's a couple different ways that the financial industry tries to help someone. So sometimes they're trying to get a greater rate of return. Sometimes they're trying to help you with budgeting. And if I remember correctly, you gave an example to me the other day around, you know, if someone was making it 120,000, which might feel out of reach for some people might feel very in reach, very doable for the person watching this. And you walked me through three scenarios where where that money would grow to. And I would love to just, I think, break down the, the essence of what you're able to do, just very small changes over time can, can show up very, very powerfully. If you can, I would love for you to share this. Absolutely. The scenario that we talked about was $100,000,

9:20or it was $10,000 a month of net income. Yes, 120,000. 120,000. And a couple assumptions we made. One is that incomes were going up at 3% a year. So just regular cost of living adjustments every single year. And you know, I'm sure you make more money than you do five years ago. Yes. And I'm sure you hope to make more money five years. That's how it's not a wood table, but that's the hope. Right. And so just in general, our incomes are going up. And the other thing that we talked about was that you were the money that you keep, you would hope to get a 6% rate of return on that money over over time, just to set the stage. So when we looked at the math around that, $120,000 a year coming in going up by 3% a year and assuming your wealth is growing at a rate of 6%, we just wanted to measure the amount of wealth that's actually flowing through your hands. And mathematically, that just comes out to about 13.7 million dollars. Like that's what we're stewarding. That's what we're responsible for. That is the amount of wealth that is flowing through our hands that we have to make this. Assuming a 6% rate return. Pretty modest. So it's pretty

10:21modest over 30 years. You're making your the first year you're making 120,000 and then every single year you're increasing that by 3%. And over 30 years, just 30 years, if you've made this 6 years, it'd be crazy. But over 30 years, that's over 13 million dollars. Right. Okay. Right. So that's, you know, that was just to set the context. Yes. Right. So that's the, that's like my wealth potential. That is how much wealth is flowing through my hands. And then we looked at it and said, well, most Americans are only saving 4%. But if you're a 5% saver, meaning that you're consuming 9500. It hurts my heart. Oh, no. Right. Oh, no. When you, when you have 13.7 million dollars flowing through your life, you actually only retain 700,000 of the 13.7, which means your lifestyles cost you 13 million dollars. Just to be exact for the person watching, it's $684,609, meaning you've foregone over pretty much over 13 million dollars just by only saving 5% and that 5% sadly is above the average, which is just terrible. Right. And,

11:21you know, I don't think $684,000 is going to get you to the promised land 30 years from now. No. It's today, today's dollars, that's not great. 30 years from now, a dollar, or so. Yeah. Or totally. Our industry has always looked to solve this problem. And the solutions that, that come up all the time, or one, I would call it the sales and marketing solution, which is my products better than your product. I can get you better rate of return. Right. And so we can go chase, we call it the rate of return chase. Yes. Right. And what we did was we measured, say, well, what if you got 9% instead of 6, like a 50% increase in return? Like just, just again, we're assuming 9% every single year from the next 30 years. No downside, no losses, no fees. I feel like that would be malpractice personally to model something like that. But yeah, you're saying even if you're assuming 9% what's the difference? And you go from 684,000 to 1,136,000. So you want to get back at another, what, 400, 500 maybe, yeah, $4500,000? Yeah. Over 30 years. 30 years from now.

12:27Assuming that you're going to earn 9% never never. So the moral of the story is it's not about the rate of return. And because think about the level of risk that you'd have to be willing to assume to get that. And there's just, and that solution is out there in the public constantly. And people are taking an unnecessary level of risk when they don't have to. The other solution that the industry likes to come up with is budgeting. Budgeting is like doing without telling your kids, no, sacrificing, it comes with a lot of guilt and shame. The average American household has 6 to 900 transactions a month. So how do you budget that? How do you track of that? And oftentimes, budgeting is about a minimization mindset and not living the life that you want. But let's just measure it. So if I could double my savings rate, like what do you want to give up? Is it the vacation? Is it, you know, daycare? It like, what is it that you're willing to give up? But let's imagine you did. And now I spend $9,000 a month versus $9,500. So that's like doubling my savings

13:31rate. And I get back to 1.3 million. There's still millions and millions of dollars of loss. Or what if we can do something different? What if we could live the life you're living today, not take any additional risk, not have to change my lifestyle, just stay the way you're living, but actually just control, put a mechanism in place that controls the gap between your money coming in and money going out through time. So in other words, what I'm saying is live the life you're living, just load the increases of your consumption going forward. Like I don't, I will we want is asynchronous cash flow. My income is going to do what it does and my consumption should not be correlated to that. And that's the problem people live in correlation. So by changing one simple thing, I'm going to call this unconscious savings. Okay. And the only thing that I'm going to change is rather than my lifestyle costs going up at 3%, but just say they went up at 1.5. So that another way of saying that is I'm going to instead of spending an increase of 3% each year, I'm going to now spend every

14:35year, I'm going to spend an additional 1.5% more than last year. Your lifestyle is still expanding. Yes. But like I'll give you an example. The biggest outflow in my life is my mortgage payment by far. Yes. It's going to be the same number for the next 24 years. So my consumption can go up by a rate, you know, higher than 1.5. Right. Or at 1.5 or less than the 3% of my income and my lifestyle is still expanding at this rate of inflation. Yes. Love it. Right. And so when we look at that, just by changing that unconscious savings has you at $2.8 million a wealth. By still keeping the 6% rate return. Keeping the same 6% rate return. Keeping the same $9500 lifestyle expense and just slowing the increases going forward. Yes. And by the way, I think and you're assuming you're starting with people saving 5%. You're starting at 5%, which is not this unattainable 20% if you're talking to someone off the street. And you're saying all we're doing is instead of increasing by 3%. It's 1.5. It's half of that.

15:38And if someone's like that, that feels like a very easy yes. And you just put over a million extra dollars on the model. Yeah. Well, it's actually the current cash flow is at 684,000. And it goes other solutions out versus almost $2.8 million. So over $2.2 million. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's almost 400% increase. And we didn't talk about products. We didn't talk about anything right now. So I can still budget and I can still go chase rates return, but I don't need to. So like, why don't we minimize the risk and just completely eliminate it from our lives. Right. And that's just phase one of this. It's phase one is about just creating the right structure around your cash flow. So you're in the maximum amount of control. Mm-hmm. And then the rest of our work together is all about creating more velocity in your cash flow. Yeah. So that we can now improve the inflow line. First, it's controlling the outflows. And now adding and tweaking and making all these little incremental shifts over time to allow the income curve to go up. I love it. Yeah. I love it. Okay. So in summary, your,

16:42obviously, anyone, anyone that watches this, I think we'll get it and it'll get the power of this. And it's like one of those things where it's like, yeah, in theory, you could do this. But if you don't have a tool like currents, your default, you're not going to be able to hit this. In budgeting, it's going to be tricky. So why is currents a tool that actually helps you do this easily versus the other budgeting out there? Yeah. So most budgeting apps are they take a look in the rear view and they tell you that you already went to Starbucks too often last month or you spent too much money. And it's sort of a negative feedback loop in my opinion that you're constantly getting. We're telling money where to go. Now, currents was built because I was doing this like with spreadsheets and yellow pad drawings with a brokerage account for my clients. And I knew we were having these outsides results. The challenge I had as an advisor as I couldn't provide these metrics like we knew what was happening. But at scale, I couldn't provide these metrics to, to, and these insights that we're giving to my clients in the way that we needed to.

17:45So we built the technology so that I could have basically a dashboard that allows me to manage an entire population of clients and see everyone's momentum. Are they improving? Are they slowing down? Do they have surplus cash? Do they like all the key metrics that I need to do the best jobs that I can do? That's where currents was born. And it creates incredible interaction with the financial professional and what we call the member, which is the users and users of our tech. What's his face to like literally showing the inflows and outflows? So I think a bit more from a planning process perspective, right? So when I meet with clients, one of the things I want to do is I want to educate them. Like to me, cash flow is an all-encompassing term that talks about all the money, all the cash and its equivalents that are flowing in and out of our lives. Like there's really ultimately three movements of money. And there's variations of each, but there's money coming in new monies that didn't exist that are now showing up in our life. We call them inflows. Those are your paychecks, bonuses, interest income, pension income, social security income, gifts. Those are inflows. New dollars that didn't exist before. And then we

18:50have outflows, which are dollars that are leaving and never coming back. So like all of our lifestyle costs every time I pay a bill right now, we're I'm staying in this beautiful hotel. And that was a cost I'm never going to, you know, I got temporary value, but it's gone and it's gone for good. And so money's leaving and never coming back or what we call outflows. Consumption. Consumption. Yeah. The space between inflows and outflows is the only place that capital is created. And so that wealth that's the only place wealth is created in that gap. And what we do with the capital we retain that net cash flow, where we put it with the choices we make. Am I putting in my right pocket? Am I putting in my left pocket? Those are what we call capital flows. So if I'm going to move money from a savings account into a brokerage account, that's a capital flow. If I'm going to capitalize my business, that's a capital flow. I don't know if that's in real estate capital. I'll put money into a life insurance policy capital. Oh, permanent life insurance. Yes. Right. And that term term term term is as an expense. And you know, all of our clients have term insurance for certain reasons, not all of them, but most of them. One, because we want to

19:52protect their income. But then it comes down to efficiency. So the the game here is understand and have the flows of money going in the right direction, know exactly where they're going, create structure and rules based around it. And then it's about the ongoing calibration of your cash flow model. So I'll give you an example, right? We want to create velocity. We want to create renewable cash flow. When people make money, like when I meet with people, there's an intense amount of gravity that shows up in people's lives. Yes. Right. Like when we make your earned income, it's taxed the highest possible rate. Yes. That could be as high as 37% the federal income tax rates. When I make money, right? I'm sure everyone, the audience feels like this is you almost feel like your partners with the government. You pay federal taxes, social security taxes. I live in New Jersey. It's a high tax state. Maybe someday you'll get me to come to Tennessee. But there's like this incredible amount of confiscation that takes place. Yep. And then after that, if I looked at your pay stub and then the other line items on your

20:56pay stub, I'll see things like maybe you're paying for some voluntary benefits. You may be paying for your health insurance, retirement plan contributions, but you could be contributing to your 401k. But these things are actually starving our cash flow in the present. Yes. Not saying it's a bad thing, it just may not be the best first place for our money. So there's all kinds of confiscation that takes place there. And then after all that, then you finally get to bring money home and you have to deal with life. Your fixed expenses, your housing cost, your lifestyle expenses, your variable expenses, like your utility bills and your kids. And it's just a lot. And then the question is, is how much money is left over? And so I'd say this way, the world is designed to take money away from us. Yes, it is. And I see every advancement in financial technologies around making it more convenient and easier for you to spend money. Right? It's never there's nothing else. Now, now you can buy a burrito with four installments. Right. You can literally finance your door dash. I know. It's incredible. And so yeah, it's making it easy to say yes. But most of the time technology is is not bettering, bettering our future selves. Yeah. It's interesting. Because in

22:00a way, it is, but in a way, it's at the expense of our financial future selves. And so what we want to do for the people that we work with and we want to build out a more robust, evergreen, cash flow model. And what we need to do is start to incorporate what we call cash flow engines, assets that produce income above and beyond what you can earn through manual labor. And more often, that those income streams are taxed more efficiently than your paycheck. So I'll give you a couple example. Many of our clients own businesses, business owners make money, they get to spend it first and they taxes on what's left is very different than being unemployed. We have a lot of clients that are in the investment real estate game. If you have the appetite for that, when you factor into appreciation deductions, which are really nice right now, 1031 tax exchanges, mortgage interest deductions, it wouldn't be uncommon for a real estate investor to produce cash flow or income, tax on average 10% or even less. You may want to invest in the markets. And some people, that's the appropriate place for them to put money. When you look at taking advantage of qualified

23:06dividends or even long-term capital gains rates, if you're managing for total return, you can have cash flows created that are taxed on average, maybe as low as 15%. If you have municipal bonds, you produce interest income tax at zero. And then there's another asset called permanent life insurance that produces dividend cash flow, also taxed at zero percent. So Caleb, the idea that we want to create, the motion that we want to create is capture what we can, Yes. Bring that capital over here and then implement the engines that are appropriate for you, Yes. Whatever they may be, allow that to produce additional cash flow to help the inflow line and bring that cash flow over here to alleviate the pressure on life so that there's more money left over and then we want to do it again and then you get another turn on the money. Yes. And then we're doing it over and over and over and over again. Yes. That's the environment that we want to create. Like I care more about compound cash flow than I do about compound interest. Okay, say that again. You care more about compound cash flow, which is every year more cash flow, net cash flows being captured than compound interest. As opposed to the accumulation theories that

24:06are out there, compound this money, reinvest my dividends constantly. And I just have one tool, doing one job and hoping that it works out there a year or so now. Because what's interesting, the institutions are doing exactly this, but they're saying compound interest just lock up your money and we're going to give you these compounding numbers, but they're actually the banks and institutions are understanding the power of cash flow. Totally. And then when you start to integrate the right cash flow engines that are appropriate for you, you can actually create, you know, it's like hydrogen is hydrogen and oxygen is oxygen when you put things together in the right quantities, you actually create water. And so we not know what we do is we are always engineering the right combinations, the integration of the assets that are producing income so we can outpace or beat the tax environment. Yeah, I love it. I love it. So what's interesting is that doesn't happen automatically. And here's the reason why when I meet with people, this is including myself at one time, is that we all make money and the first place we send it is our checking account. And here's where you pay your bills, you have your fun, you live your life, pay your bills, and then maybe at

25:06the end of the month, what Americans do is they move money over into a savings account. And if you're anything like me, life is exactly what I was doing. Tens to get in the way and you send the money back to the checking account. The problem is is that when we're taking our inflows and we're putting them into our checking account, which is really an expense account, it's designed to pay bills and spend money. If our new monies that are showing up are in the expense account, then our spending is always going to be correlated to how much money we make. So what happens is as incomes go up, spending runs in parallel, and that's how you end up with lifestyle creep, some people call Parkinson's law, which basically means that our lifestyle expands to the level of capital that's available. And so we want to break this connection. We don't want this is unconscious consumption. But we want is also there's no accountability built into this model. That's another thing. But yeah. So here's it's really simple. This is all we do is we set up what we call a cash flow reservoir account. Now with currents, this is your account as a client. It's FDIC insured up to $3 million. You

26:07earn a competitive rate of interest and you get a control panel that you can actually connect all the assets that you have and tell your money where to go. Now, the big thing is this is a structural solution as we did when we did the simulation. But open up this reservoir, you just put a dollar in there. And what we look to do is rather than send our paychecks to our checking account or bill pay account, we take our paychecks and we put them right into our reservoir. While simultaneously, you connect your reservoir to your checking account where you pay your bills and then that reservoir will then feed your checking account with the money you need. And when you do that, that is the instant with the magic happens because you've actually separated spending from income. Yeah. Like not in theory, but actually, you're actually done it. Yes. And so what happens is if I were to graph it, when your income is going up over time, your spending is now staying flat. Yeah. Unless you consciously increase your, yes, we call this spending baseline. Yeah. And this is, I'll give maybe this is a bad example, but here's an example as a business owner. Yeah.

27:10You obviously at the end of the year, potentially can take a distribution, an extra, extra dividend. So this last year, I did that. And so there was, you know, it was somewhat substantial if you compare it to what we're living off of. And yet, my family didn't change at all. Right. Because we're continuing to spend. Another was two instances that I increased spending a little bit for two reasons. So it's like we went into the reserve or what do you call it or reservoirs. And, you know, did a one time, let's put a little bit of money. So that was two times a full disclosure. But over time, as we potentially are making more money, now I'm thinking about pretty much capital flow, the whole thing. Where can I take this money that I, that I, an additional money, and instead of increasing our consumption and my style, where, where can we make moves? Now, one of the things that I also could do is potentially talk to my wife and say, maybe instead of what was spending this, let's increase it by one percent. And so that's something that I

28:10probably need to be better at because I'm like, how many years can we stay? You know, and April, if you're watching this, I love you. But like that is because it just makes so much sense. And it's like, hey, I, and another thing that's happened is I've become way less controlling of money. Because instead of having all of our money in our checking account, being like, hey, what are we doing? It's like, I'm totally good with the money that we get at each month, spending down to zero because it's not the zero. It's zero in the checking account. But I have other money. So I'm like way less, I just like, I'm way more at peace and then actually keeps April and check because instead of seeing maybe a large number in a checking account and being like, oh, we'll be fine. There's, there's a legit like, hey, I want to make sure that we have money for next one. Right. So it's, it's actually, it's like, you're gameifying living paycheck to paycheck when you're not living paycheck to paycheck and your fate. Your total control and, and, and, and so you, you can increase your lifestyle, but you're going to do it consciously. The amount of confidence that that gives you because you, when you do this, you've defaulted every future increase in

29:11income to automatically go to savings. You're automatically going to create capital with it and create choice. You can choose to spend it, but you're going to choose to do it. Not some other, yeah, not the outside world. Right. And so, so let's create some velocity here. And this is how it goes. So we set a target balance in there. However much money cash should always be in the, in reserves. Yes. Right. So think of it as part of your emergency funds. But then this thing also then becomes the opportunity fund. And we could coordinate and integrate all the other assets that you have in cash. The engines. So automatically the reservoir is going to capture the difference between what comes into your life and what goes out. And you're going to get a accumulation. And every time there's extra cash above that target balance, you and I get to have a conversation that sounds like Caleb, do you want to spend this money or do you want to go create one of those engines we were talking about to improve this, this line over here? Yes. So you're going to say, all right, let's create an engine and whatever that may be, it's just going to be another asset that produces additional income. Then what do we do with the income? We put it in here and now we got more accumulation and the momentum's happening faster. And then you're not going to have a conversation

30:14that sounds like Caleb, do you want to spend this money or do you want to create another engine? You're going to say, I want to create another engine. Right. And then what's going to happen is that's going to get bolted to it. And now now we're in second gear. And then we're going to have too much money and we're going to say Caleb, what do you want to do? Spend a little bit more. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's going to increase my spending. So maybe it will spend a little bit more because you know, April's got to live. And then. And so, you know, when the capital starts showing up and then we just, it's we're constantly allocating creating compound cash flow. And you go from first gear to second gear to third gear to fourth gear. And that's a great momentum. Yeah. What's this thing going to again, we didn't we didn't talk about this before. We're April and I want land. And we it's there's a comment. I don't want to look back in regret. Not, you know, maybe getting a dream property. But I also don't want to put myself in a situation where I'm like having to cut corners or feel that stress. So one of the things that I want to be able to do is I want to be able to afford whatever we do through our consumption number, like comfortably. In order to do that, I need to make sure that we have more cash flow engines. And so it was actually a productive

31:16conversation with with April to be like, okay, here's the goal. And I want to be able to, I don't necessarily believe in passive income, but I I want to create assets that create cash flow in addition to our business and be able to comfortably with whatever that number is going to be with current, which current is going to be a big part. Know that like whatever decision we make, I want to be able to finance it through that. Not tap into principle. Not tap into, you know, not drop a couple hundred thousand dollars of savings because that's not just cost me those savings. It's cost me a lifetime of what those savings could earn in a capital flow. Totally. So if you think about it, the acquisition of your dream home, this real estate vacation home, that's going to pay dividends to your family in a different way. Yes. Right. But if you're set up and you know, and you have your paychecks coming in or your distributions from your business coming into your reservoir and you have a baseline on your consumption, you're automatically going to create capital. Now you are automatically also putting money to work, right? You own permanent life insurance. Yes. The reason why permanent life insurance is so important. Think a bit like this.

32:18If a lawsuit or loss of income, which could be premature death or a disability, tax law changes, market fluctuations, interest rate changes, like all those things would actually hurt the velocity of our cash flow. Would it? Yes. So if that's true, then building a hedge against all those things would actually improve the velocity of your cash flow. Correct. Right. So that's why life insurance is so important because it is the only asset that actually protects you against all those things at the same time. Yeah. So life insurance, this is not investment or financial advice, but life insurance is one of your favorite assets because of those reasons for capital flow. Yeah. I mean life insurance. 100%. Yeah. And a lot of our clients own term insurance. And that's because they want to protect their income, but that shows up as an expense. That's made from you checking account. But where I was going with this is no choices unto itself. And to me, it's never an either or if the acquisition of a piece of real estate is important to you, then the game is how do we cash flow it? Right. I think that's where you're going. It's like,

33:20I'm not going to just go save up a bunch of money and then, and then, and then just buy a house. No. Well, what if we can use the assets that we have, the merits of my cash flow system to go acquire the real estate? Yes. And if you choose a rented or not, that's icing on the cake. Like, I don't want to see people have to go buy real estate just because, and they need a renter to make sure that deal works. Exactly. Right. I want to build redundancy. This is all about redundancy first and then velocity second. Yes. Right. So like, why not have your life insurance dividends? Get dumped into here. And then you take that cash flow to pay for the mortgage on the piece of real estate. Let's talk about life insurance dividends because in a lot of cases, and a lot of our clients, you take the dividends and buy additional paid up addition. Right. Okay. So it's essentially the dividend can come to you. It can come to you. Tax-free. And, but there's also an option where you can buy additional life insurance paid up additions. And it really comes in by almost increasing dollar for dollar and cash value. Right. Now, Bob Castelone, you and others I've recently been talking to are a big, big fan of taking

34:22your dividends in cash. Talk to me about, and it's interesting because now you can have that flow into your reservoir. But like, talk to me about the pros and cons of that. So, I think first and foremost, in your accumulation years, it's important to ensure a loss of income. As you go through time, it's really about having capital, using it as a capital replacement tool, the backstop, the ultimate backstop wealth protector. The game of acquiring life insurance to me is about efficiency. Like, I own most of our clients own a lot of term insurance early on. And then it's just about how do we make it efficient? Like, term insurance is a losing proposition if you're using it as a long term strategy. Over time, as I'm starting to acquire my insurance, I'm converting it to term insurance as my cash flow is improving. I'm just running my cash flow through my life insurance, always having access to that to then go do the other things that I want to do with my money and then put back. So, dividends to me is just the earnings on

35:23the policy. Like, it's defined as a return of excess premiums. It's my money. I can use it. And there's a lot of like, your money has a lot of work to do. If I had one dollar, like, think about all the jobs it needs to handle. So, why do we have to default, put it back into the life insurance policy to grow that death benefit? You can always buy more later if you're insurable. Right? So, I like to use the, it's about the utility. It's a better way of saying it. It's about the utility. If I could use the cash flow off the life insurance policy to create another asset, and then the asset is going to create another income stream, I can then buy more life insurance. And you could always take that dividend and just buy more life insurance through a paid-up addition if you want. And I believe from a basis standpoint, it could potentially be even better for your basis. I'll have to do research after this, but it's like if a- This is a whole nother rabbit hole. We can go down. But if an insurance company takes the dividend and puts it into paid-up additions, does that increase your basis or not versus if it pays to you and I then, out of my pocket,

36:24tax-free dividend put into additional paid-up additions and increases my basis. I'll have to look at this. This is like, and this is why this is real-time conversation, but that alone, if that's actually true that there's a basis difference between how you, the dividend buying a paid-up addition insurance versus you, that alone could be a reason why you should take dividends and then put it right back into policy if you wanted it back in your cash valley. Totally. So, think of it like this. I'll give an example of a client that I was working with years ago. Young teacher, Mary-2 Police Officer, I met them when they were- They were just getting started and they went through their series of step raises. So, their incomes were rising pretty sharply. We had a really great cash flows. We bought a lot of permanent life insurance. They had some other investments as well. They came to me and said, you know, in New Jersey, the common thing in the winter time is people go to Vermont for skiing. They like to ski. Their siblings families were growing, and the family had a condo in Vermont. They were just too big. The family was getting too big.

37:28They were like, you know, we really got to figure this out. How are we going to keep being with our family? It was a problem. They said, well, they were thinking about maybe we should not change some planning. One of the things we did was we took their dividend. I asked them, how much is it costed by the condo that you're in Vermont? I think it was like $150,000 at the time. Well, they had $7,000-$8,000 of dividends. We just pulled out lever. How did the dividends go to the reservoir? That financed the condo. Then what they do is they're not using it. They rent it and it goes back to the reservoir. If they want, they can put the money back in the life insurance or put it in some other cash flow engine. I feel like this can be a whole other podcast. As we're landing the plane here, it took me a few times in conversations with you. You've spoken on my event multiple times. Obviously, it's clicked, but you've worked with me. I didn't click immediately. What else do you think is important to share before we stop? It's really simple. I think our industry has a way of making things more complicated than they need to be.

38:33But all we're doing is putting people in a position where they're saving all their money. Then choosing how much money they want to leave their life as opposed to how much money they want to add to their future. Does that make sense? I think that's what I wanted to show for today. I could talk for hours and hours and hours about this. But to me, it's just the mechanism. The current is, I would say it this way, current is a structural solution, not a product solution. Right. For most people who are talking about products, this is structure. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you for coming on. Thank you for your support. Just in what, what, how you've helped better wealth and just your friendship. If you are a financial professional watching this, we'll have a special link for you, for you to learn more about currents. You've been super generous. So definitely check out that link. And then if you're someone who's not a financial professional, but you're like, hey, I want to use currents in my own life. We have a special link down for you, or you can learn more about what that looks like. Dave, any final

39:37thing that you want to say before we stop? I probably should have showed more screens. But you know, what we've done is actually give the cash flow control in the palm of your hand with the mobile app. We didn't really talk about the tech much. It's all an app. It's all, it's all an app. So when you, as a consumer, you see all the important metrics in real time on the momentum of your cash flow. And that was one of the things that was important to us that we could deliver, as well as being connected to our financial professional, as well as having a control panel where we can tell our money where to go because you literally are connected. Your reservoir becomes the hub of all of your financial money movements. And again, what we do is constantly provide really great insights on the cash flow. It's great insights. And if you want your financial professional, the person that you're working with have insight on that, it gets them more exposure. And so it's powerful, not only if you're financial professional to use with your clients, it's also powerful just for you to see personally what targets you're hitting. And obviously you're building the

40:41foundation first, build up your emergency. Do you call it emergency or do you call it something else? Your emergency fund. I would say that the reservoir is part of your emergency funds. It can be your emergency fund, but it's really part of your emergency funds. I personally, part of my emergency funds is life insurance cash rates. I have other bank accounts. To me, they make up the emergency funds. The reservoir itself is what we want to do is it's the connector of all the cash flows. And there's always a redundant balance in there, which is what we call that target balance. I see. I see. Okay. Well, thank you so much. Thank you so much. And very much look forward to hearing comments. Your biggest takeaway. And yeah, we'll have to have you back on. If you're a high earning professional entrepreneur or someone who wants more control of your money, we offer something called a clarity call. It's a one-on-one conversation where we learn more about your situation and walk you through how integrating whole life insurance could help better your financial situation. It's no pressure or fluff. Just real clarity on whether this strategy is right for you. Click the link in the description or tag comment below and we'll

41:43walk you through exactly how we can help you. Thank you so much, listening to the Betterwell Podcast. It would mean the world to me if you could hit subscribe, leave a review, and share this with the people that you know and love.